“The only real power AI provides is up-skilling.
A mediocre person with AI will produce better-than-average results…at best.
But a master of a craft with AI?… that’s the real danger.”
I keep returning to those lines, we have spent years asking whether the machines will take our seats. This question is simpler: Whose hands are on the handles and will they continue to stay that way?
Replacement is a myth, only metamorphosis exists
Early industrial looms did not erase the art of weaving, cameras did not end painting, calculators did not kill mathematics. Google did not kill research. Each wave of new technology is met with resistance. We humans fight ever so desperately to prove our worth. We feel the need to reaffirm our importance, and anything that threatens it terrifies us. We pulled routine work downward toward machinery, yet it pushed refinement upward toward makers. Give an average worker the latest model and they climb, from ordinary to well “barely acceptable”. Hand the same model to a seasoned pro and you witness something miraculous: velocity spliced with vision.
Why not collective intelligence?
If you had all of human knowledge at your fingertips what would you do with it, humans have fantasized for years the power that would provide us, yet we scurry and hide at the sight of it.
The sky is no longer the limit
Skill compounds. AI is to a layman what a smartphone is to a Victorian–era child: a fun gimmick, a marvel beyond comprehension. But a Victorian–era child cannot vibecode a tech startup in a week. They can’t drive trends on social media, cancel artists or topple billion–dollar brands with a meme. Exceptional work becomes the new “good.” And “good” becomes the new mediocre. Excellence never sits still.
Great work becomes the benchmark.
Extraordinary work: that is where the future negotiates its terms.
Progress is an upward spiral, not a straight line
In every field, progress circles back on itself. New tools spawn new questions, which demand new skills, which spark new tools. AI joins that spiral as a catalyst, not a conclusion. The goal was never to replace. It was always to grow and growth pulls us forward, replacement means shuffling the pieces. It was never a new deck.
The quiet power of partnership
Think of AI as an assistant that never tires, forgets, or sleeps. Yet the assistant waits for direction, your partner needs hypotheses, context, prompts. Agency remains human. Taste remains human. Meaning remains human. That is our true safeguard against obsolescence.
Where do we go from here?
I will proffer no guidance, agency remains in your hands, you must learn first hand what it means to be great, I cannot tell you the answer and neither can it.
Cultivate your skills or you will sink. that is my only warning.
Closing note
Average will always exist, but it drifts upward each time a new tool arrives. The masters, however, keep sprinting ahead, turning ability into art. AI does not steal our future, it hands us a sharper chisel and dares us to carve deeper.
We all stand the chance to be Michelangelo, but can we set the angel free?
