We're headed for the slopconomy

Senior year of college, I made a prediction: AI would automate computer work.

I had just downloaded Cursor and was watching Wix, WordPress, and Squarespace get erased in real time. If AI can write code, and everything on a computer can be controlled by code, then everything on a computer can be automated. It sounded outrageous then. Slides? Excel models? Clicking around a browser? But through tools and skills, each piece snapped into the next.

However, I'm not worried about the jobs. I'm worried about our minds.

When answers become free

Picture a kid with a machine that can answer anything. Homework is due tomorrow. Do they sit with the problem for an hour, getting it wrong and trying again? Or do they type it in, get a 100, and move on?

You'd ask the machine too. Everyone would. Struggle is optional now, and people rarely choose what's both optional and hard.

Slop in, slop out

The scarce skill is no longer finding answers, it's asking the right questions. But good questions come from knowledge. A beginner doesn't know what they don't know, so they ask the obvious question and get the obvious answer: confident, polished, and hollow. That's slop.

You can already see the split. The best engineers and designers are getting more productive because they know what good looks like. The people who never understood their jobs are becoming slop cannons. Anyone can produce their output.

"But AI is the new age of learning"

I don't think that's necessarily true.

To learn from AI, you have to ask the questions that would teach you, and people who haven't learned don't know what the best questions are. It's a catch-22.

The solution is to learn how to learn.

Break a topic into pieces, find the edges of what you don't understand, test yourself, and sit with confusion until it becomes clarity. Learning how to learn is the outcome preached by education, but from my personal experience, most never make it that far. Most memorize what is needed to pass an interview, but fail to understand the underlying concepts that perhaps had been taught in a class that was deemed irrelevant for work.

My bet

Everyone is saying AI will replace learning and knowledge. I'll say it as plainly as I can: it won't.

AI makes knowledge more valuable, because knowledge is what tells you whether machine output is good and what teaches you which questions to ask.

And if you learn how to learn, you can use AI to learn everything else.

If you don't, you'll become a slop cannon. Even a kindergartner can type "pls fix," "make this better," or "think harder" over and over. Congratulations, you've been matched by a five-year-old with a keyboard. Your value is slop on demand.

That's where we're headed. The slopconomy.