Thought Experiment
Imagine that tomorrow everyone woke up and had the piano playing chops of Sergei Rachmaninoff or the footballing skill of Lionel Messi. What would happen next? Let’s simulate some possibilities using the football example.
Option 1: Everyone loses interest in football. Viewing figures plummet because it is totally demystified. Any person can play football at the highest level now, so who cares about watching it! Wages for football players drop to average levels because the supply of this skill is everywhere. The magic is gone, and so is the money.
Option 2: Football explodes and becomes even more ubiquitous than it already is. Now, everyone is engaged. We all play it constantly. Other sports become less interesting to us. Now that this ability is widespread, we all want to do it as much as possible. There are many more leagues and orders of magnitude more professional footballers.
Option 3: Nothing changes. We still watch football avidly. Footballers still get paid an abnormally high amount. The number of people playing football at the professional level stays, more or less, the same.
Nothing Changes!?
Option 3 seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? But let’s dig into that. Most people can talk. Many people can talk really well. They have interesting things to say and are engaging conversationalists. Yet podcasts are everywhere. Often, we would gladly listen to a podcast with conversations less compelling than ones we could have ourselves. There are a huge number of musicians in the world. Yet, they all listen to music. In the case of concert pianists, they listen to pieces of immense complexity that they themselves can play at the same level. Clearly, there is something strange going on.
Hierarchies of Competence
AI, if it hasn’t already, will allow us all to wake up one day as experts. Suddenly, our capability in a field will be astonishing. We can already generate artwork (arguably) on a par with any human artist. We can emulate the style, tone, and cadence of the great writers of history. Soon, we’ll be able to create video content in the same way. We’ll all be expert writers, artists, coders and directors.
AI democratises skills but doesn’t distribute the willingness to put effort into something. A tool is only as useful as the will of the person using it allows it to be. We consume things not because we can’t do them ourselves but because we don’t want to. It is simply easier to listen to an interesting conversation than to have one. There is a different kind of pleasure that comes from watching a football match than from playing in one.
The most startling possible outcome is that very little will change. The baseline level of skill may skyrocket, but hierarchies of competence could remain unchanged. This was never a question of skill but rather, of desire, work ethic, commitment, and a litany of other intangible attributes that separate the people who succeed in an area from everyone else. The skill level difference between the people at the top of an industry or sport is negligible. It’s about mindset.
Even in a world where everyone has technical skills without trying, the best will continue to be the best, for more or less the same reasons as always.