The Future of Expertise
The Impact of AI on the Value of Domain Knowledge
It doesn’t take a deep academic understanding of economics to recognize that when the cost of goods or services decreases dramatically, you’ll see a disruption in that market.
But what’s happening in today’s economy is a bit unprecedented. What happens when expertise across nearly every domain and accumulated over millennia commoditizes at a rate faster than we’ve ever observed in human history?
The Supply & Demand Economics of Expertise
When we lower the price of expertise/creativity, we lower the supply in the marketplace at a given price. The consequence of this price reduction on creative and expert knowledge work happening across the economy due to the way emerging AI technology is being deployed and monetized is that there will be less creativity and less expertise developed.
I have to use the Mollick-ism here: I’m not talking about the future. I’m talking about things that have already happened. Take a look at what happened to Stack Overflow, one of the largest online water coolers for domain knowledge in software engineering, upon the release of ChatGPT (credit to The Pragmatic Engineer for this image):
Fewer and fewer questions are being asked on what was once one of the world’s most important marketplaces of software engineering expertise. With a reduction in demand comes a reduction in the value of the expertise on offer, which leads to a reduction in the supply of this expertise. This is a canary in the coal mine when looking at the impact of AI on value of expertise.
Maintaining Dominion Over Expertise
Businesses that rely on domain expertise and individual creators, inventors, engineers, academics, consultants, etc, all face a common problem now. So long as their domain expertise is easily consumed by web scraping bots or freely given away through terms of use on social platforms, they will struggle to maintain price premiums.
Of course, domain experts have experience they pair with knowledge to bring differentiated value to their company, clients, or craft. The sum of the value they create is typically not all documented in machine-readable form. But now is the time for all businesses and individuals to get more intentional about how their expertise will co-exist in a world with ubiquitous AI systems that are designed to extract this expertise and monetize it for someone else.
My intention for this newsletter is to explore the supply chain of expertise as it is disrupted by AI and to provide insight and practical advice for individual experts, creatives and businesses that want to maintain dominion over their expertise, domain knowledge, creative style, and experience.