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 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 value, 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 hard to find. We can find them now.
In the near future, the only reason ‘here are the facts you asked for’ jobs will persist is because some (most) people won’t grasp how to use LLMs capably, 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 distinguish a bad fact from a good fact prior to AI? If you couldn't tell 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; there’s basically no knowledge limitation for anyone anymore. You and your aptitude with 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 mankind has never known.
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, 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 you’re seeking. Claude, GPT, 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 takes effort and repeated use of different models. But if you put energy into it, the information is there.
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 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 becomes a drab fish adrift in a vast ocean of undifferentiated, insipid online waves.
If you’re imaginative and in marketing, content, or writing, AI involvement should be a whitepill. 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 them the same prompts and instructions. “Hey, you know how we’ll stand out in marketing? By using the apps and strategies everyone else does!” This is how the gray NPC thinks.
When an intelligent system is accessible to everyone, it’s the user and his prompts that make the difference. Leveraging LLMs in incisive ways distinguishes you when they’re 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. The Machine is a tool, same as a rifle; the gun does not make a marksman.
If everyone stands on a 6" box, then no one is taller in a useful way. If everyone takes steroids, it’s no longer a competitive advantage. You do it to keep up, not to stand out. It’s no different with AI. That means it becomes even easier to dominate if you’re authentically rarefied and insightful: you’ll be the only color atop an ocean of digital gray.
If everyone has AI, then competitively no one has AI; you are what drives the difference. What happens if you and LeBron start juicing? Do you both get as strong? Can you inject your way to Steph’s jumpshot or Brady’s accuracy? Are you and Terrence Tao equally smart while holding the same calculator? What’s the differentiator? The answer is inescapable in any domain. The unconventionally, biologically gifted will always be ascendant, because anything available to everyone manifests in pronounced power laws in their favor. The strong get stronger. The fast get faster. The smart get smarter. Disproportionately so.
The talented don’t just use the tool, they see possibilities others can’t conceive. It multiplies the gap that already existed.
AI is not the great equalizer, but the great amplifier.
These AI business applications are simply a 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.
When the entire internet dissolves into an insipid ocean of undifferentiated gray — where the Topic O’ The Day human gossip nodes become indistinguishable from computerisms — it only sharpens the contrast of those who don’t run this Red Queen’s Race. Those who exist in low-time-preference, evergreen fields are the only human game left in town.
AI does not work magic for your creativity. Using it gives you no 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 when everyone’s on the sauce, the verbally adroit and genuinely artistic become even more valuable as The Machine proliferates. AI amplifies a certain type of person and marginalizes everyone else.
AI elevates the talented, dilutes the ordinary, and enables the industrious. Power laws will intensify. 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.
I’m rather neutral/curious/skeptical on all AI conversation, but I do think this is a very interesting take and nicely put -
“A Centaur in the mythical sense is a man/horse hybrid.
A Centaur in the technological sense is a man/machine hybrid.”