The wall used to be the years
To keep your craft just means to keep up the practice, to not let it slip. Your craft is whatever the thing is that you do, programming, database design, music, metalwork, a thousand others, too many to really list. And for most of human history keeping it up was enough, because the practice itself was the moat. You spent years getting good at something, and those years were the wall between you and everybody who hadn’t put them in. The reward for building that wall was simple, you got to be the one who knew. You were the expert, the advisor, the person people came to because you had actually lived the thing they were only now running into.
Then the wall came down
Then in 2022 OpenAI released ChatGPT, and the wall started coming down, and not slowly either. In the short time since, AI has disrupted just about everything it touches, and it touches everything. People call it a new “age,” the same way the internet was a new age, but the internet mostly just changed how we move information around, and this changes who needs to know it in the first place. Now everybody has their own personal expert in their pocket, for just about anything, or at least that’s what it feels like the whole thing is building toward. And it leaves me with a question I genuinely can’t put down. What happens to humanity when humans are no longer the experts?
The expert is older than the job
Because that role is older than any job we have. Tribes grew because they had elders, people who carried the history and passed it down through storytelling and through narrative, and that was how knowledge actually moved, person to person, earned. Now we live in a society where everything feels like a 1+1 question and response. Hell, Google killed first-hand communication, and then social media finished it off. We went from having to go out and earn first-hand knowledge, to “here’s a website that supports my claim,” to “AI said it.” Every step of that felt like progress, and every step also moved the knowing a little further away from any actual human.
What actually survives
So what survives? I think the only thing that does is the kind of experience you can’t flatten down into information without losing the whole point of it. A joke explained stops being funny. A song described to you isn’t the song. Being told how a story ends isn’t anything like living through it. AI is incredible at handing you the information inside a thing, the summary, the synopsis, the takeaway, but for some things the information was never the point, the experience was. And what makes those things hold seems to be voice, and taste, and personality, the parts that only exist because some specific person was the one who made it. Maybe those are the durable moats. Or maybe, I don’t know, they’re just the last ones to fall.
My own version of the question
I keep coming back to my own version of all this. I’ve worked with data for well over a decade now, and I’ve been part of every step of the life cycle, capturing it, cleaning it, standardizing it, exposing it, analyzing it, reporting on it, presenting it. That was the craft I kept up, that was my wall, and for a long time it made me somebody’s expert.
The first time I saw ChatGPT it blew me away, and almost in the same breath it had me wondering whether I still had a reason to be in the room. I can ask AI to build everything I do and everything I know how to do, and now it just feels like I’m taking a math test with a calculator. How much of the work can I really take credit for, when my only contribution is words on a page and ideas, not the actual work? I keep waiting for that feeling to fade as I learn the tools and get better with them, and it hasn’t. As AI has evolved, gotten better, done more, it hasn’t answered the question. It’s only amplified it.