Episode summary: AI needs specialists. So what happens if we stop creating them?
Generative AI is already changing the economics of specialist work. Organisations are looking at where AI can reduce their reliance on writers, designers, developers and other people with deep expertise.
In the short term, the productivity argument can make sense. But what happens over the longer term if fewer people can make a living developing specialist skills?
In this episode of Track Changes On, Caroline Warnes looks beyond the immediate impact of AI on jobs to ask what happens to human expertise five, ten or twenty years from now. Drawing on her own experience as a writer, she explores how professional practice develops specialist knowledge, what organisations risk losing when they reduce that capability and why this could create problems for AI itself.
She also looks at emerging research into human knowledge and model collapse, and asks whether organisations focused on today's efficiency gains are paying enough attention to where tomorrow's expertise will come from.
In this episode
* Why specialist expertise depends on years of sustained professional practice
* What happens to the talent pipeline when fewer people can make a living from specialist work
* Why reducing specialist capability could affect continuous improvement inside organisations
* What emerging research says about AI, human learning and knowledge collapse
* Why AI's continued reliance on human-generated knowledge raises a longer-term question about who will create that knowledge in the future
Research referenced in this episode
Acemoglu, D., Kong, D. & Ozdaglar, A. (2026). AI, Human Cognition and Knowledge Collapse. NBER Working Paper No. 34910. DOI: 10.3386/w34910. Read the NBER working paper
Shumailov, I., Shumaylov, Z., Zhao, Y. et al. (2024). AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data. Nature, 631, 755–759. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y. Read the Nature paper
Companion article
This episode is accompanied by a full article on Track Changes On, where the ideas, research and practical reflections are explored in greater depth.
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