Josh AlleyHear it from the horse's mouth when they understand cars are here: AI is better than you at many forms of human skill, and AI will only rapidly improve and cover more ground.
Those who are at the frontier with AI are experiencing what will be the future for others. You're not excluded.
When AI was becoming widely available and people started to use it, they got their first taste of the capabilities. They saw it, they experienced it, and the most common counterpoint was always a god-of-the-gaps cope.
You've heard it, too. And you probably still hold some of those same beliefs.
“Well it can't do X perfectly, so my job is safe.”
“It doesn't account for taste, so people are still needed.”
When AI videos started to be a thing, you'd get a hilariously bad Will Smith eating spaghetti. This created joy even, because now we have a new art form to play with, yet it's nowhere near being good enough to replace even a junior level 3d artist.
Three years later, Will Smith is now believably eating spaghetti.
In 3 years, AI closed this gap. And now, we're pouring trillions into scaling the tech so it can improve much more quickly.
It's the pace of progression that most people don't fully comprehend. In 3 years, a joke turned into something seriously damn legit. In 3 years, everyone in this industry felt pretty safe, and this kind of genuine excellence was not conceivable.
Imagine the quality of these two videos as being scored: the first gets a 10, the last gets a 90. There were other iterations across other models between 2023 and 2026, and they were showing solid improvement every year. These are arbitrary scores, but you get the picture.
Now plot that on a graph. The X axis is time, the Y axis is quality.
Will Smith eating spaghetti test
| Label | Quality |
|---|---|
| 2023 | 10 |
| 2024 | 20 |
| 2025 | 45 |
| 2026 | 90 |
That graph directly represents the Will Smith video test, and a similar shaped graph exists for software development, graphic design, copywriting, tax preparation, legal work, radiology, and yes, even plumbers. The more digital-first paths are the lowest hanging fruit, the physical ones will have a longer X axis. But it's all the same.
AI's purpose is to do this. It is the value proposition of the technology. It is the reason to adopt it.
In the linked article above, the author makes a case for the gaps where humans can still find value and make crucially important contributions and steering for AI.
But those are gaps to close. "Taste" can be trained. Any action where the human has an impact can be measured, be it in sales, clicks, and so on.