Olaf Witkowski

This is a healing grid by Japanese artist Ryota Kanai. If you stare at the center, the irregularities start to heal themselves because your brain strongly prefers to see regular patterns.

If AI will soon match any human cognitive skill, then enhancing your “AI skills” (or whatever similar meme) will not be a moat because using AI is itself a cognitive skill. So where’s your edge? The only thing you really have over AGI is your novelty: AGI can never be you. You have 100 trillion connections in your brain. That’s a lot. No AI will ever precisely replicate those parameters. The training data isn’t there for AI to vacuum up because you are the only entity ever to live your life, and the only one who ever will. The question is whether the sum and total of all that experience yields a novel perspective, where the value is in its uniqueness. Even today those who make a living off their perceived novelty tend to be the most successful. We anticipate a novel (yet often internally consistent) take from a public figure or leader or artist or intellectual we like or respect. Uniqueness and novelty will retain their edge in a post-AGI world because there are virtually infinite possible 100-trillion parameter minds, and even the largest model theoretically conceivable can never capture that whole distribution. At the same time, the once-sterling premium of those skills that no longer make us unique is sinking. Expertise that once distinguished people, like how to code, is losing its edge. But the tricky part is that new skills, like “using AI effectively” are equally vulnerable. All of it just takes intelligence, and that’s the thing that’s being automated. Seeking some new “safe” skillset is a looming adventure in frustrating futility. But what’s still left is your unique perspective. Novelty. No one and nothing can see the world through your eyes. But you have to nurture that uniqueness. Post-AGI, being like everyone else would be the real danger.