What becomes valuable when competence becomes cheap?
By Joe Cozart
And perhaps that is the larger economic story we have been struggling to name. For most of the industrial age, we assigned value to competence because competence was scarce. A good accountant could calculate what others could not. A good travel agent knew what others could not easily discover. A good researcher could locate information that ordinary people could not conveniently obtain. A competent cook could prepare something at a level difficult to reproduce at home. Entire professions were built around asymmetries of knowledge, access, skill, equipment and time.
Technology has been steadily attacking those asymmetries.
AI accelerates the process dramatically because it does not merely automate physical labor. It begins automating competent intellectual labor. It can summarize, calculate, compare, organize, translate, draft, search, categorize, forecast and increasingly recommend. The economic consequence is not that intelligence becomes worthless. It is that ordinary competence becomes abundant.
And abundance changes price.
This is where much of the conversation about artificial intelligence seems strangely unimaginative. We keep asking which jobs AI will eliminate when the more interesting question is what qualities become more valuable after AI becomes ordinary. Every major technological transition destroys certain premiums while creating others. Industrial machinery reduced the premium attached to physical production while increasing the premium attached to capital, engineering and distribution. The internet reduced the premium attached to possessing information while increasing the premium attached to finding, organizing and interpreting it. AI may reduce the premium attached to competent execution while increasing the premium attached to judgment.
That distinction is enormous.
Knowing how to produce an answer is not the same thing as knowing which question deserves to be asked.
Producing twenty strategic options is not the same thing as recognizing the one option that changes the geometry of the problem.
Generating a thousand restaurant concepts is not the same thing as knowing which room people will want to sit in for three hours.
Writing grammatically correct prose is not the same thing as having something worth saying.
And producing food efficiently is certainly not the same thing as hospitality.
The restaurant therefore becomes an unusually elegant laboratory for watching this transformation because the commodity and the premium sit beside each other on the same table. The food can increasingly be standardized, centralized, predicted, automated and delivered. Almost everything necessary to satisfy hunger can be optimized. But the moment we move from hunger to dining, the equation changes. Nobody celebrates an anniversary because the kitchen achieved excellent throughput. Nobody remembers a first date because inventory utilization improved seven percent. Nobody returns twenty years later because the restaurant had an efficient point-of-sale system.
We remember how places made time feel.
That may be the scarce commodity of the next economy.
Not information. Not competence. Not even convenience. We are rapidly producing extraordinary quantities of all three.
Meaning.
The restaurant that understands this will not necessarily fight automation. Quite the opposite. It may automate everything that does not deserve to be human so that it can lavish human attention upon everything that does.
Let the machine forecast how many steaks will be ordered Thursday evening. Let it optimize inventory. Let it schedule deliveries. Let it monitor refrigeration, predict staffing requirements, analyze reservation patterns, manage routine purchasing and calculate precisely how many bottles of Burgundy should be downstairs.
But when I walk through the door, someone should know my name.
That is not nostalgia. It is economic differentiation.
The paradox of AI may therefore be that the more machinery surrounds us, the more valuable unmistakably human experiences become. A handwritten note becomes more interesting in a world of instantaneous messages. A conversation becomes more valuable in a world of generated content. A craftsman’s irregularity becomes attractive precisely because industrial production can make everything perfect. A waiter who remembers that I prefer the corner table becomes more meaningful because a database could have remembered it but a person did.
We may eventually discover that personalization and recognition are not the same thing. A computer can personalize something perfectly. Recognition requires another consciousness.
There is an important distinction there.
The algorithm knows what I ordered last Tuesday.
The maître d’ knows why.
And now the argument moves beyond restaurants entirely.
The same separation will appear in law, medicine, education, consulting, finance, publishing, architecture, entertainment and nearly every knowledge profession. AI will increasingly provide the competent layer. It will prepare the first draft, assemble the research, identify precedent, model alternatives, detect anomalies and perform the thousand pieces of cognitive housekeeping that once consumed expensive professional hours.
That does not necessarily eliminate the professional.
It eliminates the professional’s ability to charge a premium merely for being competent.
The surviving premium migrates upward.
Judgment. Taste. Interpretation. Responsibility. Trust. Originality. Context. Courage.
And perhaps most importantly, knowing what matters.
This is why I increasingly suspect that the great divide of the AI economy will not simply be between people who use artificial intelligence and people who do not. That distinction will disappear rather quickly because eventually almost everyone will use it, just as almost everyone eventually used electricity, telephones, computers and search engines.
The more consequential divide will be between those who use AI to produce more competence and those who use it to reach beyond competence.
One group will generate faster.
The other will see farther.
That is the upstream position.
If everyone has access to roughly the same extraordinary machine, competitive advantage cannot permanently reside in possession of the machine. It has to reside in what one asks the machine to examine, what one notices in its answers, what one refuses to accept, what connections one makes that were never explicitly requested, and what one understands about the problem before anyone else realizes there is a problem.
Which returns us, rather unexpectedly, to dinner.
The restaurant of the future may have robots in the kitchen, algorithms in purchasing, predictive analytics in inventory, automated systems at payment and artificial intelligence quietly orchestrating the entire operation.
Wonderful.
Now that we have finally removed all the unnecessary friction from running a restaurant, perhaps somebody can greet me at the door.
The machine may not destroy hospitality at all.
It may finally force us to remember what hospitality was.
And AI may ultimately do something similar to civilization itself. By becoming astonishingly competent at the things we once mistook for intelligence, it may force us to decide what intelligence was for.
That is a considerably more interesting future than robots taking our jobs.
It is also considerably more demanding.
Because when competence becomes cheap, there is nowhere left to hide.
——— GMJoe™ ———
Clarity. Strategy. Sovereignty.™
Live Upstream.™
Books by Joe Cozart are available at: amazon.com/author/joecozart
Joe Cozart is an author and founder of GMJoe™ Consulting.