Everyone Got the Same Superpower. Now What?
AI now writes code, edits video, drafts contracts and composes music, and it does this for anyone who opens a browser. A capability everyone holds at the same level stops working as an advantage. It becomes a baseline, and a baseline gives nobody a reason to choose you over the next person.
The clearest way I have found to describe the problem comes from role-playing games. In World of Warcraft, a player picks a class (mage, rogue, druid) and spends points along a branching map of abilities, unlocked by committing to one direction. That commitment is what makes the character yours, and it is also what makes the next level worth wanting, because you know what the next step will give you. I call this a signature path: a sequence of abilities that is visibly yours and has a visible next step.
AI hands out power without a signature path. It does roughly the same thing for everyone who uses it. Experience helps you steer it, but nothing in the tool tells you where your path leads or what committing to it will earn you. That is why so many daily users describe the same flatness: they produce more and feel less sure of where they are heading.
For about a century, education supplied the path. You chose law, medicine, engineering or music, and the institution gave you the calling and the sequence of skills that followed.
A large share of what those sequences trained, such as drafting, analysis, research and production, is the layer AI absorbs fastest. The old paths still exist on paper, but each year they lead to less. The new ones are not visible yet, because nobody has walked them long enough to draw them. Drawing them is pioneering work.
My own route never had a curriculum. I studied journalism and cinema at the Brussels University. Year 2000 was approaching, companies were looking for new IT profiles. After spending a couple of months in Microsoft certification, I applied to several consulting companies and started working in Business Intelligence across Europe. In 2003, I left that structured path for twenty years of independent building. I only understood the shape of what I had walked by looking back at it, which is the normal condition of anyone on a path nobody drew in advance.
This is also why I think most AI transformation starts at the wrong end. In my BI years I watched trainees stop using the tool after the training ended, and I saw projects fail for organisational reasons while the software did what it was supposed to do. The current wave repeats that pattern at a larger scale.
Companies roll out tools, the tools usually work, and the people whose technical tasks were automated lose what defined their value without anyone giving them a new definition.
Redefinition has to happen in the person before it can hold in the organisation.
What remains once the technical layer is handled will not be on your skills list, because skills are exactly what is being commoditised.
It sits in two places this series looks at closely:
- the abilities so natural to you that you have never noticed them,
- the material your life gave you, including the parts that hurt.
A practical place to start this week:
Write down what people keep asking you for that you would never put on a CV, because it seems too easy to count. Do not judge the list. Those requests are other people pointing at a part of your path that you cannot see from the inside.
If the old paths are gone and the new ones are not drawn, what is yours?