Trashbags of Facts and Insipid Oceans
You can just learn things
You Can Just Learn Things
The old economy was run by those who knew the right facts. The new economy will be run by those who know how to ask the right questions.
AI is devastating if your professional reason to exist is just regurgitating facts. Reviewing facts and approving them. Compiling facts. Collating facts. Stacking one fact on top of the other into a fact report. Fact harvesters, those who comb the fields of known information and provide little extrapolatory services, are in trouble.
Those whose job is to be a big trashbag of domain-specific facts will fall victim to the ultimate fact summoner. The more whitecollar your facts, the more you’re in danger... because that means your facts are expensive. Costly fact-furnishers will find their facts are the most aggressively commoditized by The Machine. Having uncommon facts at your disposal doesn’t make them hard to comprehend or retain, just difficult to find. We can find them now.
In the near future, the only reason the “here are the facts you asked for” jobs will persist is because some (most) people won't grasp how to capably use LLMs, or regulations will act as a meatshield that legally requires a human tell you facts instead of The Machine. Hey did you know sometimes the AI hallucinates and gets things wrong?!? That’s crazy, humans never do that. How did we figure out a bad fact from a good fact prior to AI? If you couldn't distinguish good info from bad before AI, you won't suddenly develop that ability with AI. Critical evaluation is… critical. Which means it’s not an AI issue, it’s a skill issue.
If you know how to use AI, you are liberated to do almost anything you want. You are no longer constrained by information. You are only constrained by your ability to creatively synthesize.
AI truly makes the "you can just do things" mindset a reality, because it renders you almost entirely reliant on only yourself to make shit happen, because there is basically no knowledge limitation for anyone anymore. You and your aptitude to use The Machine are the only blocker insofar as raw information is concerned.
A Centaur in the mythical sense is a man/horse hybrid.
A Centaur in the technological sense is a man/machine hybrid.
Those who best understand how to collaborate with The Machine, and extract the educational wealth buried inside it, are the new Centaurs. They’re augmented with an on-command information reserve that mankind has never known before.
If you effectively deploy these tools, you have a sort of prosthetic neurological appendage, one that magnifies your efforts and abilities to navigate previously privileged realms. If you believe the same could have been said for the internet, it means you don’t understand the capabilities of these instruments. You should use them more. If you’re not getting what you want out of them, start by looking within.
These LLMs are treasure chests that require a prompt-based key to unlock. The true competitive differentiator is knowing how to generate the right sequence of words (a prompt) to uncover whatever gold it is you’re seeking. Claude, Deep Research, DeepSeek, the gifts they offer you if you know where to look are incredible.
If you master how to leverage these resources then any fact, save only the most esoteric and arcane, is at your fingertips. It’s not as easy as asking one LLM a question and thinking your job is done, it does take effort and adversarial use of different ones. But if you put energy into it, the information is there if you really want it.
The next wave of riches will belong to the linguistic architects and syntax savants, because they’ll know how to coax and confer best with The Machine. They will be the best Centaurs.
You can just do, and learn, things. Anything.
Insipid Oceans
While AI democratizes access to information, it paradoxically concentrates rewards in the hands of those already equipped to harness it. The implications for creative industries are particularly stark.
The above seems like it will help marketers and startups. It won’t. It will only further marginalize the unremarkable and magnify the talented.
The “AI tool-ification” of everything means that dull folk will produce even more commoditized, mediocre output. Even more replaceable. The typical marketer is turned into a drab fish adrift in a vast ocean of undifferentiated, insipid online waves.
If you're imaginative and in marketing, content, writing, etc., AI involvement should be a whitepill. Something that excites you. But only if you’re actually unique. The interesting will grow more noticeable. The vapid more forgettable.
All the LinkedIn-tier marketing slop, the kind the above service automates with AI, will now be churned out by the same models with the same unremarkable minds feeding it the same prompts and instructions. “Hey, you know how we’ll stand out in marketing? By using the tools and strategies everyone else does!” This is how the gray NPC thinks.
When an intelligent system is accessible by everyone, it means the user and his prompts make the difference. Your leveraging of the tool in incisive ways is how to distinguish yourself when the tool is commonplace. AI is not a panacea for middling abilities. It’s the human who can conceive of an ingenious idea, expressive string of words, and artistic strategy that morphs into a greater asset in such a world, not the omnipresent Machine.
If everyone stands on a 6" box, then no one is taller in a useful way. If everyone is taking steroids, it's no longer a competitive advantage to do so. You do it to keep up not to stand out. It’s no different with AI. And that means it will become even easier to dominate if you are authentically rarefied and insightful, because you'll be the only color atop an ocean of digital gray.
If everyone has AI, then competitively no one has AI, because that means you are what drives the differences. What happens if you and LeBron start juicing? Do you both get as strong? Can you inject your way to Steph’s jumpshot? What’s the differentiator? This answer is inescapable in any contested domain. The unconventionally gifted will always be ascendant, and any device that’s available to everyone manifests in pronounced power laws in their favor. The strong get stronger. The fast get faster. Disproportionately so.
These AI business applications are a simple competition for pedestrian virtual volume. A way to bombard the digital commons with prosaic exhaust. All these companies will draw from the same digital well, flooding your timeline with an endless cascade of algorithmic banalities.
AI does not work magic for your creativity. Using it does not give you a competitive edge in an environment where it’s the norm. Its saturation will exacerbate homogeneous mediocrity, and the crafty and clever will remain the key scarce asset. Just as natural athletes rise to the top if everyone is on the sauce, it's the verbally adroit and genuinely artistic that are even more valuable as The Machine proliferates. AI amplifies a certain type of person and marginalizes most else.
AI elevates the talented, dilutes the ordinary, and enables the industrious. Power laws will be enhanced. The great will become greater, the average will be invisible.
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Impatiently waiting for AI to beat the fact-regurgitators we call physicians.
AI is an amazing tutor, and you can certainly learn a lot quickly using it, but it's also a bit of a trap because AI also really intensifies the Dunning-Kruger effect. Being able to pull up facts on anything anytime is great for creating the illusion of expertise. Lacking the context of a real education in any given domain it'll be very easy for people to make what they think are informed decisions while missing whatever the LLM doesn't 'think' to tell them. A big part of expertise is knowing the right questions to ask, LLMs don't really help you with that.