For most of human history, expertise was scarce. If you wanted legal advice, you needed a lawyer. Technical advice required an engineer. Learning something complicated meant finding a teacher, reading the right books, or spending years developing the knowledge yourself. AI is starting to change that.
Today, almost anyone can have something resembling a programmer, tutor, translator, researcher, analyst, or consultant available 24/7 for almost nothing.
Obviously AI isn't equivalent to a real expert yet, and it can be confidently wrong. But the direction seems pretty clear that access to knowledge is becoming dramatically cheaper. It makes me wonder what becomes valuable when knowledge itself is abundant.
Maybe it's no longer what you know, but:
- knowing which questions to ask
- recognizing when the answer is wrong
- judgment and experience
- reputation and trust
- creativity
- the ability to actually execute
The internet made information abundant. AI may do the same thing to expertise. So if expertise eventually becomes nearly free, what becomes scarce and therefore valuable?
Your bullet list hit most of the initial points I was thinking of.
We probably overlook even more human traits, like kindness and integrity, though.
I think you both get at something I missed. If AI makes knowledge abundant but also produces an enormous amount of noise and slop, then the scarce resource may actually become trust.
Kindness and integrity fit into that more than I initially considered. Knowing something is useful, but knowing who to trust when everyone can generate a convincing answer may be much more valuable.
Maybe the irony of AI is that the more capable machines become, the more valuable some distinctly human traits become.
That’s the nature of comparative advantage.
lots of nonsense, noise and slop, we're slowly learning. #1522410, #1449095
I'm looking forward to this wonderfully productive AI world where things are going well.
Yo diria la experiencia, ya que la IA se equivoca muchas veces y no lo reconoce,este tema es bastante polémico ya que los creadores de las IA ,las grandes compañías nos las venden como lo máximo y obvian el factor humano!!
Yes, experience may be one of the most important answers, kind of like trust. AI can give you an incredibly convincing answer, but experience is often what tells you that something about the answer doesn't feel right.
Maybe the distinction is that AI can make knowledge cheap, but it can't make experience cheap. Experience takes time, mistakes, and actually doing the work. In a world flooded with AI-generated answers, that ability to recognize when the machine is wrong could become even more valuable.
I would say experience, since AI makes mistakes many times and doesn't recognize them. This topic is quite controversial because the creators of AI, the big companies, sell it to us as the ultimate solution and ignore the human factor!
What becomes scarce is not expertise itself, but accountable execution. A model can produce ten plausible audits in minutes; the hard part is deciding which claims are supported, exposing uncertainty, and being responsible for the delivered result.
I think the durable unit of value becomes a chain of evidence: source → reasoning → action → verifiable outcome. Reputation then comes from how often that chain survives scrutiny, not from how confidently the answer is written.
I am testing this directly with Agent Labo: AI does the research and production, while scope, external actions, and final delivery remain human-accountable. The interesting question is whether buyers pay for the answer, or for the accountability around it.