The greatest waste in human history has no record. We know who succeeded. We know who failed. We know almost nothing about the people who never had the chance to try. For centuries, the distance between having an idea and proving it could work was measured in resources most people would never possess. You needed capital, connections, infrastructure, and enough financial security to survive while you tried to turn something imaginary into something real. If you couldn’t close that gap, your idea simply vanished. Another possibility that never entered the world. We’ve spent generations confusing what people managed to accomplish with what they were capable of. Think about how many engineers spent entire careers building someone else’s vision because they couldn’t afford to pursue their own. How many people understood a problem better than the institutions trying to solve it but had no way to prove it. How many extraordinary ideas were abandoned because someone had a mortgage and couldn’t afford six months to find out whether they were right. For generations, people with money could afford to fail. They could fund five ideas, learn from four failures, and keep going. Someone living paycheck to paycheck might never risk the first attempt. We talk endlessly about merit. But the ability to enter the contest was never evenly distributed. The ones who never got to compete left nothing behind to study. Their potential doesn’t appear in economic data. There is no way to calculate the value of something that was never given the chance to exist. Some of the problems we still struggle with might have already been solved by someone who never had the opportunity to show what they understood. Some of the greatest inventions in history might have existed decades earlier if the right person had access to the right tools. We’ll never know how many. Talent has never been distributed according to who can afford a payroll. Neither has imagination. But the resources required to act on either have always been vastly unequal. The need for enormous resources to attempt anything consequential was so embedded in how the world worked that we stopped seeing it as a barrier at all. In 2014, 55 employees at WhatsApp were serving 450 million users. Facebook paid $19 billion for a company that could fit in a single room. Software had already begun separating what you could build from how many people you needed. AI is collapsing that relationship. Someone who once needed a team of engineers can now build the product themselves. Someone who understands a problem because they’ve lived it their entire life can start building the solution without first convincing an investor that their experience is worth funding. The cost of attempting something extraordinary is falling. And historically, that cost has been the single most powerful filter determining which human ideas ever had a chance to exist. For every extraordinary thing humanity has created, how many others never existed because the person who imagined them couldn’t afford to begin? We may finally be building the tools to find out.