When AI reduces the value of your expertise to zero, what will you sell?

We are all about to become eat-what-you-kill workers

Transformative technologies usually follow a top-down diffusion path: originating in government or military contexts, passing through corporations, and eventually reaching individuals… LLMs display a dramatic reversal of this pattern - they generate disproportionate benefit for regular people, while their impact is a lot more muted and lagging in corporations and governments…

An individual will usually only be an expert in at most one thing, so the broad quasi-expertise offered by the LLM fundamentally allows them to do things they couldn't do before. People can now vibe code apps. They can approach legal documents. They can grok esoteric research papers. They can do data analytics. They can generate multimodal content for branding and marketing. They can do all of this at an adequate capability without involving an additional expert.
Andrej Karpathy, X, 8/4/25

Today we’re announcing Mechanize, a startup focused on developing virtual work environments, benchmarks, and training data that will enable the full automation of the economy… The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year.
Mechanize co-founders, 17/4/25

We’re now starting to see these models, these [AI] platforms able to perform really high-level, what we consider to be really high-level intellectual work. Already, the current models of AI can code better than let’s call it 60, 70% of coders. Now, we are talking highly skilled jobs that pay really good salaries, and that up until recently have been entirely a seller’s market in Silicon Valley. A lot of that work is going to go away…

So, it may be that everybody now, not just blue-collar workers, not just factory workers, are going to have to figure out, “Where do I get a job? How do I get enough income to feed my family?” All of us will be facing some questions about, we’re producing a lot of stuff. How do we distribute it? And what’s fair and what’s not? And how do we get purpose and meaning in our lives?
Barack Obama, 21/4/24

If they haven’t already, the value of your credentials, expertise and experience will soon go to zero.

Understandably, you will be most reluctant to acknowledge this.

Indeed, you will almost certainly remain in denial about your impending disposability for a prolonged period. Much in the same manner many of my legacy media colleagues did during the 2010s. Even long after it was evident Google and Facebook had siphoned away all the ad dollars from the legacy media, with predictable consequences for journalists’ employment prospects.

I sometimes wonder if the collapse of the media industry, which took place in earnest from around 2008 onwards, will turn out to have been a blessing in disguise. Many thousands of professional communicators – or erstwhile professional communicators – know what it’s like to wake up one day and discover the skills you’ve spent decades honing now have next to no market value.

I’m surprised more serving or former journos haven’t leveraged their experience of reinventing themselves to offer advice to those about to go through the same thing. I suppose part of the reason is that these midlife-reinvention stories rarely have a Hollywood ending.

Print journalist Stephanie Wood detailed her post-redundancy existence a couple of years back.

Here are the money quotes:

Six years ago, as I agonised over the decision to stay with Good Weekend or take a redundancy to free up time to write a book, I knew the chances of ever again getting such a great job were slim: digital disruption has upended traditional media’s business model and, globally, newspaper and magazine staff feature writers are almost an extinct species. But I also knew that, at some point, I would need to become less institutionalised, more agile, refashion my career to suit the constantly shifting new media landscape. I thought that, after the book was published, I would freelance as a writer, learn new skills, explore interesting side options, see what unfolded…

I have done all of that… I have also run myself into the ground, mostly working from home in a lonely, multitasking, all-hours hustle – exhausting, unsustainable and a road to despair and penury.

Wood’s article focused on middle-aged workers and attributed the bulk of their employment woes to rampant ageism. (A most unsexy form of discrimination that nobody gets worked up about until it starts impacting them.)

While I don’t doubt the fiftysomethings will be the first thrown overboard when the AI-driven mass redundancies kick off, I suspect their fortysomething, thirtysomething and twentysomething colleagues won’t be far behind them.

In the good old days, employers just preferred younger workers to old ones.

Increasingly, they prefer AIs to human workers of any age.

The good news, such that is, is that we appear to be in a transitional period. Within five years, almost all the white-collar work may have been automated away. Between then and now, there’s likely to be some demand for ‘AI supercreators’, aka super users.

That is, individuals who’ve gone all in on mastering AI technology and who can, to paraphrase Karpathy, combine the skills of coder, lawyer, academic, data analyst, marketer, you name it…

The catch
In her article, Wood interviews a recruiter who notes the middle-aged un(der)employed often struggle to adapt to their changed circumstances:

In the course of my research for this story, a theme comes up repeatedly – a sense of middle-aged hubris, especially in men, verging on entitlement: “I’m the best in the business”; “Don’t they know what I’ve done?“; “Why should I have to do that?” But resistance to change and reinvention and the often gritty, detail-oriented, ego-reducing graft needed to re-establish or shift a career can sentence someone to employment oblivion.

Few people are keen on gritty, ego-reducing graft. But those willing to endure it for a period may reap the rewards down the track. In contrast, those who imagine their qualifications and prior achievements will speak for themselves tend to end up in “employment oblivion”.

If you want to become an AI supercreator, you’ll first need to endure the narcissistic injury of accepting that your current skill set has been rendered worthless. You’ll then need to embark on the gritty graft of mastering AI and finding a market for the AI-assisted superpowers you’ve developed.

Lawyers – a case study
Historically, a lawyer could reasonably expect to lead a comfortable lifestyle. For centuries, lawyers have been able to charge a premium for their rare expertise. That is, a deep understanding of their society’s source code – the rules about what individuals, businesses, organisations and governments can and can’t do.

Lawyers’ pricing power was in decline even before ChatGPT dropped in late 2022. Overproduction of law grads and the emergence of legaltech start-ups that offshored and/or automated legal work had already made lawyering less lucrative. But none of the challenges our learned friends have previously faced come anywhere close to the existential threat posed by AI.

Let’s say I need a contract drafted. I can now ask ChatGPT to whip something up. Granted, it will suggest (for reasons of legal liability) that I get it reviewed by a human lawyer. Nonetheless, it will happily “draft a template” that “fits my needs” and is “enforceable under NSW/Australian law”.

If I’m leery of using a general-purpose AI such as ChatGPT, there are a range of specialist AIs offering free or freemium legal services (see DoNotPay, FreeLawChat.ai or AskLegal.bot). If I’m nervous about leaving it all to the algos and want a suitably qualified human to check over my AI-generated contract, there’s no shortage of businesses offering this service at an affordable cost.

I’m not claiming the legal industry is about to collapse. I am arguing the direction of travel is clear. In the not-too-distant future, it will seem quaint that people once put more faith in human lawyers than machine ones. The days of lawyers leveraging their expertise to propel themselves into the upper-middle class appear to be over.

I’m not the only one making this argument
I occasionally worry that the 99 per cent of the population seemingly unconcerned about the looming AI labour-market apocalypse is right and I’m wrong. Then I read an article that reassures me that I’m on the money and everybody else is tragically deluded.

If you’re unswayed by my admittedly alarming predictions, dear reader, you may like to check out this LinkedIn post from the CEO of Plexus. The CEO in question is Andrew Mellet. Plexus is one of those AIs-plus-a-bit-of-human-lawyer-oversight businesses I mentioned earlier.

Like me, Mellet believes the value of human expertise is headed towards zero:

In the past, CEOs paid a premium for ‘expertise’ and tenure. We comforted ourselves with the idea that ‘they had done the job before’, so hiring for experience would be lower risk… In the future, we will recognise that AI can synthesize ‘expertise’ much like it can ‘intelligence’ at near zero marginal cost – making tenure largely irrelevant…

In the past, we paid someone for their skillset and time. But what is a ‘skillset’ when you have an assistant in your pocket who knows all human knowledge… In the future, we will pay someone based on the outcomes they can deliver.

In an outcomes-focused world, no client or employer is likely to care much about what school or university you went to. Or even what credentials you possess. Neither will they place much weight on how well-presented, charming or clubbable you are. It’s also unlikely they will pay any attention to how long or hard you worked on a project or where you were located while undertaking it.

You will be paid solely on results. Or as Mellet puts it:

In the past, we wrote a list of tasks we wanted done and tried to match it to a list of experiences people had on their CVs. On this list was often the software competencies they have.

In the future, we will write a list of outcomes we need and we will ask people to show us how they can use AI/Agents to deliver the outcomes. We will not only do this for hiring for future roles, but we will also need to redesign and rehire current ‘roles’.

Like me, Mellet appears to be freaked out about the unprecedented economic and societal disruption that’s about to unfold:

Analogies of the past can obscure the fact that this technology change is fundamentally different from each wave we had seen previously. AI is not a tool. It is a competitor to human intelligence. Its speed of advance is unfathomable... and it's just getting started.

Unlike me, Mellet is cautiously optimistic about at least a handful of go-getters prospering in the new world:

A farmer with a tractor can do the work of 100 with a shovel. There will be humans who can deliver 100x the output of their peers because of [their] unique ability to combine AI & Agents with creativity to solve the world’s problems. CEOs will be happy to pay these people 10x more, because they will require 100x fewer of them.

Next week, I’ll explore how you can become an AI supercreator capable of delivering 100X the output of your less technologically adept competitors.

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