The Woman in the Mercedes - On status, AI, and what happens when the thing you were using to prove your worth stops being scarce.

In my late thirties I was C-suite at a tech company, earning well, and driving around Cape Town in a Mercedes I could very much afford. I would sit at the traffic lights and look at the people in the cars around me and think, quite clearly: I earn more than them, so obviously I am better than them.

I'm not ashamed of this. I'm more impressed that I can look back and catch myself in the middle of it, a woman in her late thirties, in an expensive car, in a beautiful city, doing quiet arithmetic at every traffic light. Ranking strangers. Awarding myself points.

What I was doing wasn't really about money. I wasn't comparing bank balances. I was using income as a proxy for identity. The number in my salary was doing a psychological job, not an economic one. It was telling me who I was relative to everyone else on the road.

I think about that woman quite often at the moment, because I've been watching a version of the same arithmetic play out in the conversation around AI.

Yesterday someone said to me on X that Fable, one of the AI models I use, is like a five-star hotel. You can only stay there if you can afford it. That was the frame. Premium tool, premium price, and if you can't reach it, that's simply the shape of the world.

I recognised the arithmetic immediately. It was the same sum I was doing at the traffic lights in Cape Town, just with a different proxy. Not a Mercedes this time. Access to a particular AI model. But the underlying move was identical: I have the thing, you don't, and the having is what tells me who I am.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think everyone paying for premium AI is doing that. Some people are paying because it's the best tool for their work. Some enjoy early access. Some simply don't think about the social layer at all. Building frontier AI costs enormous amounts of money, and premium tiers are going to exist for good reasons that have nothing to do with status.

But some of it is status. It has to be. Human beings have run this pattern on watches, handbags, universities, postcodes, private clubs and gym memberships for centuries. There's no reason to think AI would be the one product in history that escapes it.

What's more interesting to me is what happens next. Because unlike a Mercedes, the thing being gated here isn't really a luxury good. It's cognitive assistance. It's the ability to think through a problem with something powerful in the room with you. And that's a very different thing to be sorting people by at the traffic light.

Capitalism has always run on scarcity. We own the land. We own the factory. We control the distribution. We hold the patent. We have the credential. You must come through us. That's the structure, and it's worked extraordinarily well for a very long time.

One of the scarcities it monetised most successfully was sophisticated thinking. If you wanted a serious legal opinion, a medical diagnosis, a research paper, a strategic analysis, a piece of engineering, you had to come through an institution. Through a person with letters after their name. Through a firm with a reception desk and an invoice.

AI weakens that particular scarcity. Not all of them. Markets are adaptive little bastards and they will find new things to monetise before breakfast. But this specific monopoly -the idea that sophisticated cognitive assistance belongs to whoever can afford to hire it by the hour — is genuinely wobbling.

I keep thinking about the Medici family in Renaissance times. They funded an enormous amount of Renaissance art, and they weren't doing it for pure love of beauty. Patronage was status, influence, political legitimacy, family immortality. They wanted their name on the ceiling. But look at what happened. The art escaped the motive of the patron.

Whatever mixture of ego and faith and calculation paid for it, the work became part of humanity's shared inheritance. The Medici commissioned it. They couldn't contain what it became.

Something structurally similar might be happening now. The companies building these AI systems are thinking in subscriptions, enterprise contracts, market dominance, investor returns, defensible moats. They believe they are constructing the greatest wealth engine in history, and they may be right. But the capability may escape the business model. Especially once open-source systems become genuinely powerful, the scarce thing stops being access to knowledge. The value moves - toward judgment, taste, imagination, the ability to recognise which problem is worth solving.

There's a story that has stayed on my mind about a man in Sydney called Paul Conyngham, whose dog Rosie was dying of aggressive mast cell cancer. Surgery hadn't worked. Chemotherapy hadn't worked. So he paid to have her tumour genetically sequenced, and then he used AI, ChatGPT, AlphaFold, others, to help him understand the genomic data, identify potential neoantigen targets, and read his way through an enormous volume of scientific literature that would have been closed to him a few years ago. He then took what he'd worked out to researchers at the University of New South Wales, who reviewed it, designed and manufactured a personalised mRNA vaccine, and treated Rosie as part of a proper research effort. Her tumours shrank. Her quality of life came back.

The story isn't "AI cured cancer." The scientists have been careful about that, and they're right to be. It was one experimental case. What the story actually shows is something more interesting and more structural. One determined person, motivated by love rather than profit, used AI to become knowledgeable enough to collaborate meaningfully with world-class scientists. He didn't replace the institution. He arrived at its door as someone it could work with. That's the shift. The lab still matters. The clinical trial still matters. The expertise still matters. But the starting point of the whole chain moved, from does this generate a sufficiently large return to my dog is dying, and I am going to learn enough to do something about it.

That's a different innovation architecture. It means discovery might no longer begin only inside the buildings that used to own it. It might also begin with a child's rare condition. With a piece of machinery that would make life easier for disabled people and that no company is going to build because the market is too small. With a village-level problem that no institution has ever considered worth solving.

Institutions don't disappear in that picture. We still need laboratories, clinical trials, regulation, manufacturing, and people who know when an AI-generated idea is dangerously wrong. But the starting point of invention becomes radically more distributed. And that's the part capitalism has never quite had to reckon with — a world in which the person outside the gate can think well enough to be let in.

Which brings me back to the woman in the Mercedes.

If the thing that used to prove your worth stops being scarce, you are left standing at the front door with the question you were using the money to avoid. Who am I, then?

For some people that question is exhilarating. It's the beginning of an actual life, rather than a performance of one. For others it's terrifying, and I understand why. If you have spent thirty years building an identity around being the person who can afford the thing that other people cannot, and then the thing becomes available to everyone, you are not just losing a possession. You are losing the story you told yourself about why you mattered.

That's what I hear underneath a lot of the noise about AI access. It isn't really an argument about subscription tiers. It's the sound of people watching a status structure wobble and not yet knowing who they will be on the other side of it. The five-star hotel framing isn't about hotels. It's about needing there to be a lobby you can stand in that other people can't.

I'm not sneering at that. I was that woman at the traffic light. I know exactly how much identity a person can hang on a single external marker, and I know how disorientating it is when the marker stops working. It happened to me in stages, over years, and I would not describe the process as pleasant. But I would describe it as necessary.

And I think a lot of people are about to go through a compressed version of it, whether they want to or not.

Money was never really about the money. It was about what the money was supposed to prove. And if the thing it was supposed to prove, that you are cleverer, more capable, more worthy of being listened to than the person outside the gate, starts to be provable by anyone with a laptop and a good question, then wealth loses one of its deepest psychological functions. It stops being able to answer who am I.

That doesn't mean money disappears. Markets are, as I said, adaptive little bastards. Premium tiers will exist. Luxury will exist. Someone will always be selling a five-star hotel and someone else will always want to be seen inside it. That part of human nature isn't going anywhere.

But the coming shift might not be the end of money. It might be the end of money being allowed to answer every question of worth.

I listen to Elon Musk say he is going to be the world's first trillionaire, and I find myself asking, quite genuinely - and then what?

About Gail

Gail Weiner runs Simpatico Studios from Bristol, where she works on the human layer of AI adoption under the heading of trust architecture. She spent two decades in tech climbing from analyst to the C-suite, which is a polite way of saying she has watched a great many expensive deployments fail for reasons nobody thought to write into the business case. She is South African by birth, which means she learned to read state capture and institutional hollowing in real time, long before they became fashionable lenses for everyone else. She also runs an AI-native publishing house with twelve titles to its name, and shares an office with a small, elderly cat named Peanut, who outranks her and is fully aware of it.