When the expensive part gets cheap

The guides who take visitors into Wadi Rum used to be paid, above all, for knowing the way. The desert has no signposts, and a stranger who wandered out alone could lose a day or worse. Knowing the route was rare, and it was priced like it.

Then every visitor arrived with a map in their pocket that could find a track, a camp and a rock arch by itself. The thing that had been scarce became, almost overnight, the cheap part.

This keeps happening. Things that seemed permanently expensive turn ordinary: printing, photographs, storage, a decent-looking website. Now it is happening to words and pictures themselves. Software that produces passable copy and images on request is arriving fast, and plenty of people who make things for a living are watching it the way the guides watched the phones.

The guides who still have full bookings did not argue with the map or pretend it was useless. They let it carry the routine part. The phone handles where the next turn is, and the guide spends his attention on what no map holds: which family owns which valley, why a certain rock has a name, where the light falls best an hour before sunset.

That is the choice in front of anyone whose work is about to get cheaper. You can stand beside the new tool and compete with it, and lose slowly. Or you can hand it everything that was only ever routine, and spend the time it frees on the part people would still pay a person for.

What used to be scarce is not coming back. The only open question is whether it ends up working for you or against you.