# The Death of Expertise - Synthesis B By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2025-11-25 Perhaps the most honest response to the death of expertise is neither to celebrate our liberation nor to catalogue those who will mistake their microphones for oratory skills, but to hold the uncomfortable truth that both assessments are correct. That the same technological moment contains genuine possibility and genuine peril, depending entirely on choices we have not yet made and may not even recognize as choices. Yes, tools do not make craftspeople, and the democratization of competence will produce posers by the millions. There will be people wielding algorithmic fluency as if it were understanding, accumulating the artifacts of expertise without ever submitting to the slow work that transforms information into wisdom. Society tends to not reward humility or discipline. Spectacle had already displaced substance long before a single neural network was trained. Businesses will purchase the artificial until the critical moment when the artificial fails, and no one remembers how to do the real thing. And yet history keeps showing us that the very conditions which enable decline are often the conditions for renewal. That darkness and light are not sequential but simultaneous. That some humans, faced with the easy path, have always chosen the harder one, not because anyone rewarded them, but because something in being human makes the harder path feel more real. The death of expertise will not make everyone wise. However, it creates a new kind of calling for those who choose it, a vocation to cultivate the very capacities that AI renders economically optional but humanly essential. What looks like entrenchment might be better understood as clarification: AI further strips away the social scaffolding that once pushed people toward mastery, whether they wanted it or not. Doing so reveals who actually hungers for understanding and who merely wants its badges. The faithful who pursue AI, convinced of their easily acquired competence, will likely inherit much of the currently visible world. But alongside them others will practice the discipline of becoming wise, and their quiet work will matter most at precisely those moments when the artificial fails and only the slow-grown fruit of genuine understanding can feed what comes next. After saying all this, perhaps nothing is new here. Perhaps this has always been the story of wisdom. #### Related Items [[Wisdom]] [[Expertise]] [[Society]] [[Understanding]] [[Artificial Intelligence]] [[Spectacle]]