Oil was the industrial age’s stored sunlight as buried work, compressed by time and geology, waiting to be unleashed. Compute is the digital age’s stored competence as humanity’s accumulated experience, encoded in language and images, compressed onto silicon, and ready to be leveraged. Yet, an ocean of oil did not create wealth by simply existing. The economic surplus of oil emerged only when energy was refined, transported, priced, and sold to consumers in the form of goods and services. Production itself alone was never sufficient. Economic surplus was born only where producers answered the market’s “why” correctly. AI-assisted competence is forming a similar reserve today, not energy in barrels, but capability in tokens: a reservoir of “how” that can be summoned in seconds. Like energy, competence alone does not determine outcomes. Competence enables more execution, but it is human judgment at the edge that governs choice allowing for coherence to be established. Judgement is required for the answer to “why”. Why this product, why this market, why now rather than later. And when the cost of execution collapses, the penalty for choosing the wrong “why” rises. Therefore, internal judgement which ultimately leads to coherence must be protected.

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