A Jack of All Trades, a Master of None

You've heard the phrase many times. Generally, it's seen as a negative quality. But with the rise of AI, the place of the master is being usurped. Pour a bunch of content into an LLM and you've got the next best thing. Even better: beyond food (electricity) and board (cloud computing), you don't need to pay it anything. (For the moment we will ignore SkyNet potential) So what's an Adaptive Generalist to do?

Use them! LLMs are great at absorbing massive amounts of information and distilling them down into manageable bits. They're not good enough (yet) to solve high level problems or achieve complex goals, so humans are still just as valuable. The difference, moving forward, is the "certain set of skills" you need. The most important skill you need to have is how to answer this question - "How can I know enough about <foo> as quickly and efficiently as possible?" For coders, it's not going to be about knowing a particular programming language, it's going to be about understanding how languages work and determining the right language for the problem you're currently solving. Knowing that language beforehand? In a year or two that will be completely unnecessary. Pretrained LLMs will be freely available for every programming language on the planet. They already exist, but some companies are trying to monetize them. Eventually they'll give up.

Charles Darwin said it best when he inadvertently described Adaptive Generalists, over a century and a half ago: "It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change."