Three Waves of Democratization
Technology democratization has happened in waves. Each wave lowered the barrier to building, expanded who could compete, and disrupted incumbents carrying the weight of the previous era.
We’re in the third wave. Understanding the pattern makes the current moment legible.
Wave 1: Open Source and Python
Linux, Python, NumPy, Django, scikit-learn, thousands of libraries. Suddenly a solo developer could build on decades of accumulated work without paying for any of it. The stack was free.
A person with a laptop could do what previously required a team with expensive licenses. The barrier dropped from “can’t afford the software” to “need the expertise to use it.”
But you still needed to know Python. You still needed to understand the libraries. Years of accumulated craft to put it together effectively. The code was free; the expertise wasn’t.
Wave 2: Cloud Infrastructure
AWS, GCP, Azure. Suddenly you didn’t need to own servers. Infrastructure that required a data center team became a credit card and an API. Startups could scale without capital.
But you still needed engineers who understood distributed systems, database design, networking. The infrastructure was rentable; the knowledge to use it wasn’t.
Wave 3: AI
AI removes the last barrier — the expertise itself is now accessible. The developer with a laptop and good judgment about what problems to solve can now compete with teams that have both the code and the expertise.
Open source made code free. Cloud made infrastructure rentable. AI makes expertise accessible.
All three barriers — production cost, infrastructure cost, knowledge cost — are now effectively zero for anyone willing to learn how to use the tools.
The Incumbent Problem
Large organizations are carrying the weight of everything they built in previous waves. Legacy codebases. Organizational structures designed around production difficulty. Teams whose value was in expertise that’s now free. Old Rai stones, heavy and expensive to maintain.
A small team starting today builds on AI from the ground up. No legacy. No organizational inertia. No sunk cost in old ways of working.
This startup advantage over the incumbent has happened before — each wave created it. But AI amplifies it dramatically. The gap between what a 5-person team can build now versus what required 500 people five years ago is staggering. And it keeps growing.
Who Is Best Positioned
The people who built on the first two waves are best positioned for this one. They understand the tools. They have domain knowledge. They have judgment about what’s worth building accumulated over years.
They’re not starting over — they’re getting a massive multiplier on everything they already knew. The Python developer who spent a decade building intuition about software systems now has AI handling the production. The expertise they built compounds; the production cost they used to bear disappears.
The individual and small group advantage is structural, not temporary.
The Empowering Reading
This is the most empowering technological shift for individuals and small groups in history. Not because the technology is magic — because the barriers that kept individuals from competing with large organizations were always artificial. They were moats built on production difficulty, not on any fundamental advantage.
The flood reveals what was always true: good judgment about what problems to solve, and the domain knowledge to know when a solution actually works, were always the scarce things. Now they’re the only things.
Post 3 in a series on the AI economic shift. Previously: AI Delivers What Open Source Promised. Next: Python Taught AI to Code.