People with taste get paid more now. Not the most organised people, not the fastest. And almost nobody was trained for that.
The system we trained for
University celebrated the well-oiled cog. Fast at the software. Follows instructions. Neat, organised, reliable. If you could sit at Premiere Pro for eight hours a day, five days a week, and do it well, you were valuable.
But AI does all of that now, twenty times faster, with no salary and no lunch break. What it can't do is taste. "That's good, that's not. I like this, not that." The final 10%, the director's eye, the judgement call. That's what's left, and that's what matters.
The hard truth is that a lot of people trained for a system that no longer exists. The ones proudest of cutting clips fast are walking straight into an existential crisis, because AI can cut faster, for free.
Most software is just free tools in a wrapper
Here's a related secret: most software you pay for is open-source tools, packaged up and sold to you. The upside is you never touch any code. The downside is you pay, forever. We're a non-technical team, and we learned to use the raw tools directly, things like Whisper and ffmpeg. Learn the raw tools, and you stop renting what you could own.
The heat is coming
You might not feel the pressure yet. ChatGPT has only been out about four years. Picture a bookkeeper who spent 30 years mastering the numbers, typing 120 words a minute, two mistakes a month, and then something arrives that does it instantly.
And don't comfort yourself with "AI makes mistakes." People mock it for not doing one plus one, but a smart system doesn't calculate in its head, it writes a little script, a calculator, and gives you the exact answer. It works around its own weakness, and it gets better every single day. Two years ago I babysat AI for a whole day to build a website. Now one prompt one-shots it.
The takeaway
The table has flipped. It's no longer the fastest hands that win, it's the best taste. The difference between a good life and a hard one, five years from now, is what you choose to build today.