Imagine a company overcharges you by €43, but proving it would cost €200. You ignore it. The money survives not because it is hidden, but because checking is too expensive. Now imagine AI makes that check cost €2. I call the boundary between what is worth checking and what is not the verification frontier . AI may push that frontier down by reducing both the cost of each check and the cost of building custom verification systems. The surplus that survives mainly because checking is uneconomic is what I call an opacity rent . This goes beyond auditing. There are two questions: conformity : did the company follow the contract correctly? And optimality : even if it did, is this actually the right contract for you? What interests me most is the institutional change this could cause. A lot of commerce developed around expensive checking: auditors sample, certifiers spread verification costs, intermediaries get paid for expertise, brands provide assurance when buyers cannot inspect quality themselves, and contracts are often not designed to be machine-verifiable. If checking becomes cheap, these institutions do not necessarily disappear, but their role and value should change. That is what I mean by post-opacity : not perfect transparency, but a world where “nobody will bother checking” becomes a much weaker economic protection, forcing businesses and institutions to adapt. Where do you think this applies first, and where am I overestimating the impact? Which institutions would actually resist cheap verification rather than adapt to it? I’ve written the broader argument here: https://post-opacity.com/ submitted by /u/kach_janani
Originally posted by u/kach_janani on r/ArtificialInteligence
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