Jordan Hall argues that AI will dissolve scarcity-era institutions and usher in decentralised networks of human–AI collaboration built on trust. This essay suggests a different trajectory. As AI systems generate discourse at scale, humans increasingly provide legitimacy, interpretation and trust signals within machine-mediated environments. The emerging “legitimacy layer” turns credible human presence into infrastructure, creating new forms of platform power, cyber risk and geopolitical competition over who controls the architecture that stabilises social reality. In a world where machines can generate infinite information, the scarce resource is credible human presence.