# The Death of Expertise - Proposition By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2025-11-20 We stand at a peculiar threshold in human history, one that echoes Nietzsche's famous declaration about God but speaks to something equally profound in our technological age: expertise is dead, and we have killed it, you and I with our algorithms and AI. The murder weapon was not malicious or violent, but the next step to the altar of efficiency: we created systems that could synthesize vast libraries of knowledge in seconds, that could diagnose diseases with superhuman accuracy, that could write code, compose music, and analyze data with a facility that renders years of accumulated human mastery suddenly optional. But unlike Nietzsche's death of God, which cleared space for existential freedom, the death of expertise leaves us in a strange productive tension where everyone has access to competence but no one quite knows what wisdom means anymore, and perhaps that uncertainty is precisely the opening we need. The programmer who once spent a decade mastering their craft now watches AI generate complex code in moments; the doctor who trained for years finds algorithms outperforming human intuition in pattern recognition; the writer who honed their voice discovers that synthetic prose can mimic any style on demand. And yet, what dies is not knowledge itself but our old relationship to mastery, those slow rituals of apprenticeship and the hard-won authority they conferred, and in their passing we find ourselves free to oscillate between mourning what's lost and celebrating what's possible. So who will wipe the terminal clean? What new ceremonies of meaning must we invent now that the badges of expertise no longer guarantee insight, now that the question is not whether you can access information but whether you possess the judgment to know what matters? The ritual we need is both ancient and novel: a practice that honors the speed of our tools while cultivating the slowness of wisdom, that uses AI not to replace the journey of becoming knowledgeable but to accelerate our arrival at the questions that only humans, with our particular stakes in existence, can properly ask. The gods of mastery may be obsolete, and we can hold sincere grief for their passing while recognizing with genuine hope that their death liberates us to build something more integrated, more humble, more alive to the irreducible mystery that remains even after the algorithm has spoken. We are called now to create practices that make us worthy not of expertise alone but of the discernment that knows when to trust the algorithm and when to trust the uncertainty of our own hard-won understanding, embracing both the confidence of our new capabilities and the acknowledgment that some forms of knowing can never be optimized, only lived. #### Related Items [[Artificial Intelligence]] [[Knowledge]] [[Wisdom]] [[Philosophy]] [[Modernity]] [[Metamodernism]] [[Work]] [[Expertise]]