Bear with me for a second; I’m going to try and compare the evolution of the high school athlete with what AI means for knowledge workers. Maybe this will work, maybe I just need more coffee.
But here goes:
In high school I played all the sports. Soccer in the fall, hoops in the winter, tennis in the spring. Most of my friends were the same - we were not soccer / basketball / tennis players per say, we were athletes.
This kind of multi-sport athlete doesn’t really seem to exist anymore at the high school level, because they would simply not be good enough at any one sport to compete. For example, my daughter had to drop soccer and basketball at 12 to specialize in tennis, just to stay competitive. She now trains four days per week, year round, and she is really good at tennis (but don’t put her on a basketball court). High school sports is an arms race for specialists now.
I think the workplace may be headed the same way.
Josh Elman posted something this week that got me thinking about this: “It has never been easier to get first draft quality work (across any domain). Almost no effort.”
I’m starting to believe that this puts a specific kind of knowledge worker at risk: the Generalist. The athlete. Pretty good at a lot of things, expert in none. I used to love hiring generalists, particularly at growing companies, because they could fill different roles and add value as the company grew.
Here’s the problem. Off the shelf AI is a REALLY good generalist. It writes a decent brief, a decent analysis, a decent go-to-market plan, can crank out the ticket or update the website copy. It can handle support requests, write code. Pretty good at almost everything, but world class at nothing, yet. This is an athlete on steroids (ugh), that also doesn’t sleep or take vacations.
But what the models can’t yet do is take pretty good to world class. That last 20% requires someone who knows the domain cold. Someone who can look at an 80% output and see immediately what’s wrong with it, what a customer or board member would catch in thirty seconds. If you’ve got limited open reqs, you probably want to hire the domain expert, even at early stages.
Taste and judgment were always valuable. Now they’re the whole job.
The athletes are going to need to pick a sport, and it makes me a little sad.