Not specialists, but generalists are the ones who survive.
In the role of specialist or agent, only AI agents will remain; human agents will disappear.
A specialist is someone with deep expertise in a particular field, while a generalist is someone with broad knowledge across many different fields. In the natural ecosystem, humans survived as generalists, adapting to a variety of environments. For example, humans have coexisted with specialist animals such as the swift, agile leopard or the powerful tiger, and at times have benchmarked them to modify their own survival strategies.
The recent rapid changes in AI services and the emergence of various agents are signaling massive changes not only in the IT industry but across our society as a whole. In this piece, I thought through why, in the AI era, generalists are likely to have greater odds of survival than specialists, and what kinds of social and economic changes can occur as AI replaces certain roles. From there, I also leave a thought on what role blockchain's smart-contract concept might play within those changes.
Anyone can become a digital producer.
To put it more intuitively in IT-industry terms, developers and designers (stylists) become surplus (it's frightening, but the situation is already plausible right now). Only programmers and designers (architects) survive. This is because AI can efficiently handle repetitive, rule-based tasks, and indeed some companies are already adopting AI-powered design tools or automated code generators. This trend looks set to accelerate even more.
This is not simply the collapse of existing professions, but rather the opposite: it means anyone can become a 'digital producer.' In other words, not just a designer but a designer who can also do planning and development; not just a developer but a programmer who, on the back of design and planning thinking, takes on a freer form. Against that backdrop, ironically, the 'liberal-arts' value of theories that look like they came out of the 'Information Processing Engineer' certification - which has practically been reduced to just a license - has become very important. *(For reference, personally I see planners and managers, developers and programmers, and designers and stylists as clearly different things.)
During the wrap-up Q&A of a certain conference, the following question came up:
People differ in how they judge how far AI's capability has advanced, but many do agree that across the entire spectrum of planning, design, and development, AI is already showing satisfying performance at producing 'first drafts.' As a result, the situation and need to hire juniors at many organizations are gradually decreasing. In this kind of environment, what should those who want to break in as juniors be preparing?
The answer was so generic I don't even remember it. But in any case, the question is more important than the answer, and the audience showed sharper insight than the speaker. So this question kept rolling around in my head.
An age in which customized services have become a glut
All of a sudden, this thought struck me. Maybe, leaving aside IT, in human life in general... the kind of capacity we call 'discernment' has shifted from a sufficient condition, as in the past, to a necessary condition. Earlier I said simply, 'developers (not programmers) and designers (stylists, not architects) become surplus,' and that 'anyone can become a digital producer.'
In fact, this kind of phenomenon is a megatrend that has existed for a long time, just in different fields. In the past, the change was simply a widening of scope (along the x and y axes); recently, AI has expanded the dimension (the z axis). For example, mercenaries, religious figures, and artists experienced this centuries ago. More recently, sellers expanded that way through the internet. These days, anyone can dream of being a celebrity, and anyone is playing the role of a journalist. The range of 'so-called any-Tom-Dick-and-Harry can do this' is expanding. Even purely on the consumption side, at some point individuals started assembling computers themselves, then started repairing the cutting-edge devices we call smartphones themselves, and the diligent ones produce daily necessities themselves with 3D printers. Among them, of course, are people who use micro-PCs to build their own personal assistants.
Personally, I encountered this idea when I was double-majoring in fine arts in college. Looking at art movements through Andy Warhol, Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Marcel Duchamp, I felt there was a megatrend called 'the popularization of art.' Then that phenomenon began spreading into ordinary daily life, and now, in the so-called age of AI, anyone can do programming - not just development. Truly, an age has arrived in which the customized services proposed by specialist firms have become a glut.
A life that isn't about subcontracting other people's needs
but about having something of your own to produce, and producing it yourself.
So what's the takeaway? -
Most people will have heard the term 'personal branding' at some point. In a similar vein, my personal alternative is this: in the age of AI, our direction must be 'a life that isn't about subcontracting, but a life in which we can have something of our own to produce.'
Through this, an enormous number of people - and a lot of them highly skilled - will end up out on the street (whether they want to or not) , and we can expect no small amount of resistance along the way. Sadly, however, things will probably not turn out that way. Cold as it sounds, the ones who lose their seats are the worker ants, not the queen ant. I think it will pass as just one of countless events. There will be impact, but it won't be far from a regular round of layoffs. If anything, what comes after will deliver tremendous efficiency.
If you can prepare, even now, you should look for a way to be not a stakeholder but the principal of the stake (the queen ant). But there is one uncomfortable truth: the seat of the principal of an interest is not a seat that is easily obtained. You have to have something to trade, and that presupposes that you have the ability to trade.
In other words, uncomfortable as it is, only when you 'have the ability to buy something, build something, or purchase something' will you have usefulness as a being. The problem is that most of the building will be handled by AI agents, and purchasing will tend to follow the economics of scale. Either way, just participating - never mind comparative advantage - will become difficult, and a moment will arrive when the upper rungs of the relatively thick pyramid will, for once in a long time, become sharp again. I'm guessing the hourglass-like distribution structure of society will gradually shift toward a real inverted-triangle shape.
In this process, individuals can leverage the asset called 'MyData' (some of which has already been applied in the market, particularly in finance), but unfortunately this isn't easy either. Today's MyData (especially domestically) is managed (bought and sold) by the government and corporations, not by me. Most of the proceeds also go to them - that's the reality. And for my taste and my consumption to become data that is worth money, you naturally need consumption with context (a kind of consistency), as well as channels through which you can share that consumption information and verify its influence - and individuals find it difficult to build and manage these on their own. And those tools, too, will probably end up being made and sold by corporations.
However much time we have left, I came to a thought that was both depressing and a wake-up call: if we meet the age of AI in any state other than that of a life with something of our own to produce, in which we produce it ourselves (a self-sufficient generalist), won't we, like in the movie In Time, end up surviving by selling our individual life (our daily existence), which can be 'measured' in time?
