Everyone Is About to Be an Expert

I keep noticing something that bugs me. The more accessible information becomes, the more confidently people seem to wield it. And AI is accelerating that in ways I don't think we're ready for.

You can go from zero to conversant on any topic in fifteen minutes now. I've done it. The gap between "I know nothing about this" and "I have opinions about this" has collapsed. And the thing that made that gap meaningful, the years of getting things wrong and slowly building real understanding, isn't always part of the process anymore.

I think about the Dunning-Kruger research a lot in this context. People with a little knowledge have always overestimated their competence. That's not new. What's new is that AI gives you the little knowledge already dressed up in expert-level language. You don't just feel like you understand something. You sound like you do, which makes the overconfidence harder to detect, both for other people and for yourself.

And I just did it right there. I wouldn't have known this phenomenon was tied to the Dunning-Kruger research on my own. I asked AI, it connected the dots for me, and now I sound like someone who casually references cognitive science research. It took about thirty seconds. That's exactly what I'm talking about.

I see this in product management constantly. Someone spends an afternoon learning about a problem space (most of the time using AI, now), and they come away thinking they understand it at the same level as someone who's been living in it for years. And sometimes they're close enough that it works. But the difference shows up in the edge cases, the weird situations where the textbook answer is wrong and you need the scar tissue of having tried three approaches that didn't work before you found the one that did. Surface-level knowledge doesn't prepare you for that. It prepares you for the presentation, not production.

And we're still in the early stages of this. Right now you have to actively go to AI and ask it questions. But that's already changing. Meta glasses can project text into your field of vision mid-conversation, feeding you the right thing to say while you're saying it. You don't even have to step away to look something up. The gap between "I looked this up" and "I just know this" is going to keep shrinking until it disappears.

As this trend continues and more "experts" keep showing up, I think it's worth asking what the antidote is. At BambooHR, we have a saying: "Be a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all." I think there's a huge advantage to listening first, to understanding what someone already knows before you try to explain something to them. I don't have data to back this up, but it feels like people are doing that less now that knowledge is so easy to access.

The best people I've worked with, the ones who are genuinely great at what they do, are almost always the most honest about what they don't know. They've been wrong enough to respect the complexity of their field. They've hit walls that taught them knowledge has layers. AI can give you the first layer fast. It just can't give you the rest.

Humility and curiosity go hand-in-hand here. The people who are actually getting good with AI right now aren't the ones calling themselves experts. They're the ones experimenting on top of solid fundamentals, building workflows that help them learn faster, sharing what they find, and staying honest about how much they do or don't understand. They aren't experts in LLMs or statistical inference or transformer architecture (again, I barely know what these mean - just used AI to help me come up with some technical terms to throw in here). They just have an approach that's working, and they're iterating on it.

Be cautious about anyone who claims to be an expert in "AI" broadly. If you spend more than a few hours in the space, you start to realize it might literally be impossible to be a true expert on all of it. The field is too wide, moving too fast, and branching in too many directions. The honest position is usually saying something more along the lines of "I know my corner of this pretty well, and I'm figuring out the rest." That's not a weakness, it's the only posture that actually leads to learning anything real.