When I was younger, the craziest moment in the Matrix for me was the scene where Neo “downloads” a mastery of Kung Fu. As someone who was studying martial arts at the time, it just seemed unfair (but it was something I secretly wanted for myself).

But what seemed like sci-fi in 1999 is actually not as far away as we think, and in fact we’ve already made huge steps in that direction. Consider what it was like pre-internet if you wanted to cook something fancy that wasn’t in your repertoire. Only the chefs had the “know how” to cook that dish after years of experimentation and trial and error. But today, we can cook pretty much any dish we want and download that “expertise” right to our phones. A bit less time than the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell says it takes (unless you have terrible coverage).

I’ve been thinking a lot about Alex Danco’s very well thought out Emergent Layer series, which in a nutshell says:

• Something is scarce due to a certain point of friction
• Removing that friction abstracts away the scarcity and makes it more available to everyone
• That then also deflates an industry that was previously bloated and overserved their customers by providing a scalable alternative.

Put another way, what’s something that is typically used by people that have the resources to afford it, and what prevents that from becoming available to the masses?

To me, that layer of friction is time, which builds up to what we know as “experience” – the scarce resource. We trust people in their jobs because they’ve seen scenarios so many times, and they’ve built up a way to respond. But experience is really just many data points + pattern recognition, which helps a person respond to any particular scenario.

As more data is created, and more interfaces are developed to help the average person understand that data, we can give the average person superpowers, just like Neo. And the industries that have most been protected by this scarcity of expertise have been the skills/service industries. I’ll run through some examples that can change when expertise is abstracted:

Medicine — Doctors are walking bodies of knowledge with drilled-in pattern recognition skills. Most diagnoses fall into a category in their minds where (symptom + symptom + recognizable context = disease). A computer can easily recognize the pattern for many of these diseases, so if you text a picture of a poison ivy rash it will be able to detect it with the same (or better) accuracy of a doctor because it has seen this type of rash millions of times. That gives the average person a certain level of “expertise” a doctor has, and makes it scalable and more affordable for the average person.

Handymen — Imagine instead of having to call a handy person every time you were doing a home improvement project, you were wearing augmented reality goggles or used your phone camera to see the problem and walk you through the building process step-by-step. You PERSONALLY don’t need to have worked on this project multiple times, but the program has, and can tell you the best way to go about it.

Programming — IDE (integrated development environments) do a lot today to help assist programmers with debugging, intelligent code completion, etc. But in the future, smarter programming will help assist with logic and write efficient code, making the programmers of tomorrow seem like “experts” compared to today. In fact, many of the things you need programmers for today will be done by the average person using new consumer friendly tools to execute developer functions (wrote a bit about this phenomenon in the past).

Auditing /Accounting/Financial Services—Most financial services are outsourced tasks given to a group which presumably understands a given area better because they’ve studied it and “done enough of these services” to perform them quicker and more skillfully than you, and therefore makes it worthwhile pay them (usually a lot). A great example of one such service currently seeing scalability is 409a valuations. eShares recently launched their own much cheaper 409a valuation service, which can be done scalably thanks to the data they have from many different startup cap tables.

There will be even more skills-based industries tomorrow which will shrink as that expertise is distributed among the masses. New, large datasets + machine learning will start recognizing patterns in totally new ways to make us experts in ways we didn’t even know were possible today. Where true expertise will shine will be in cases that are ANOMALIES, and break all the pattern recognition rules. That is when creativity, one of the most powerful parts of being human, becomes a critical part of the equation. But for everything else, tech will be there to give us temporary superpowers, and we’ll be more like Neo than we even realize.

Any other industries you think will be impacted? Reach out to me on twitter @nikillinit