Domain expertise is depreciating, and it is not coming back

Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein spent years arguing about whether expert intuition can be trusted, and eventually agreed on the answer. It can, but only under two conditions: the environment has to be regular enough to be predictable, and the expert has to have had enough practice and feedback to learn those regularities.

Enterprise technology just failed the first condition. Build versus buy, minimum viable team size, time from idea to working prototype, the cost of a custom integration, what counts as a hard problem: the rules that generated twenty years of accumulated pattern recognition have moved. Robert Merton had a phrase for what happens next, written in 1940. He called it trained incapacity, the state in which one’s own abilities function as blind spots.

The evidence that the gradient has flipped is now hard to argue with. Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond studied 5,179 customer support agents and found a 14 per cent average productivity gain from an AI assistant, with a 34 per cent improvement for novices and almost none for the experienced. Dell’Acqua and colleagues ran a field experiment with 758 Boston Consulting Group consultants and found that below-average performers improved by 43 per cent, against 17 per cent for those above average.