The fundamental value of human labor is flipping from production to verification. On Bankless, economist Christian Catalini described a new reality where intelligence is a commodity. The cost of generating a strategy, code, or marketing copy is near zero. The only scarce resource left is the human authority to sign off on it.
This creates a crisis for professional development. Entry-level positions, where novices learn tacit knowledge by doing the work, are disappearing. AI is now a better substitute for junior tasks in every domain, cutting off the pipeline that creates future experts.
Christian Catalini, Bankless:
- If you're entry level, if you haven't really acquired that tacit knowledge about what makes for a great product versus just average product, AI is out of the box often a good substitute for you across every domain.
The threat climbs the career ladder. Catalini notes that top labs now hire elite experts to build evaluation frameworks, effectively digitizing their judgment to train models. In doing so, they create the systems that could eventually replace their own high-level oversight.
The shift demands a new kind of worker. On Citadel Dispatch, Matt Ahlborg argued the most valuable hires are not pure developers but marketers or community managers who can code and use AI to ship their own projects. Mid-level developers focused on perfect execution risk being commoditized by non-developers empowered by AI tools.
Velocity, not perfection, is the new metric. Ahlborg sees the barrier as ego - a reluctance to integrate AI as a core workflow rather than a casual tool.
The endgame is structural. On Moonshots, Eric Schmidt outlined the 'San Francisco Consensus': recursive AI self-improvement could arrive within 2-3 years. The programmer's role is already transforming from coder to director of an AI agent system that runs all night.
Eric Schmidt, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis:
- Everyone in San Francisco believes this, everyone I know anyway, which is that it's easy to understand.
- This is the year of agents, which we can discuss why agents will take over everything this year.
Schmidt's stark prediction is that writing code manually will soon be as obsolete as riding a horse. The workforce is bifurcating: extreme value accrues to those who can direct AI systems, while the traditional middle of the labor market collapses. The final human role is the gatekeeper, but the training ground for that role is being automated away.
