I wasn't particularly good at math in school. The most honest explanation is that I was lazy; in my partial defense, some teachers also did an excellent job of making sure I wouldn't love it.
The curious thing is that I was very good at computer science. Even better in the labs. During parent-teacher meetings, a teacher would sometimes point out to my mother that the discrepancy didn't seem very logical and, in fairness, they were right.
Years later I found myself doing a job in which numbers matter quite a lot. I didn't become a mathematician, but I learned that a number often matters less because it tells you the truth than because it forces you to test the story you had already built for yourself. Perhaps one of my obsessions began there: competence.
It has become wonderfully easy to make things
This is one of the best eras in which to be curious. An enormous amount of knowledge is available for free and, with a phone, we can publish an article, produce a video, record a podcast, build software, sell a product on the other side of the world or speak to people we otherwise would never have met.
Artificial intelligence has lowered many barriers even further. I can enter a field I know nothing about and have the basic concepts explained to me in minutes; I can write code without being a developer, analyze a technical document, translate or ask for an initial orientation on virtually any subject.
I consider that enormous progress. I do not miss the world in which only a few people had access to the tools. The problem is not that everyone can now do more things; it begins when doing something becomes much easier than truly knowing what we are doing.
Access is not competence
Owning a camera does not make you a photographer, being able to publish an article does not make you a journalist, having access to PubMed does not make you a doctor, opening an advertising account does not make you a marketer. Using artificial intelligence, in the same way, does not make you competent in everything it can explain to you.
These are obvious statements, and yet we spend much of our time forgetting them. Modern tools have reached a level at which they can easily produce many of the outward signs of competence: a well-written text, flawless graphics, technical language, a citation, a chart, a confident tone.
The appearance of competence has become easy to imitate. And when the appearance of competence is available to everyone, distinguishing someone who knows from someone who knows how to look as though they know becomes harder.
There is another problem too: genuinely competent people are often less categorical than people who know little about a subject. They say it depends, we don't have enough data yet, this study suggests but does not prove, I don't know enough about this, I may be wrong. Someone who knows little can afford much simpler certainties: it's bad for you, it's good for you, it's natural, it's chemical, it's all because of that, just do this, it works for everyone.
Simple answers are powerful because they close the problem. Competence, very often, opens it again.
You can build a falsehood out of true things
You don't necessarily need to lie. It is enough to start with something true and handle it badly: take a specific case and turn it into a rule, remove the conditions under which that rule does not work, shift the context slightly, and you have built a sentence containing enough truth to look unassailable.
“Long fermentation makes bread easier to digest.” There may be a technical explanation for some of the changes that take place during prolonged fermentation; turning that into a universal guarantee about the digestion of every person and every bread, however, is an enormous leap.
“Industrial foods are bad for you.” Industrial describes a way of producing something, not the metabolic effect of a food. We can discuss formulation, frequency, quantity, energy density, nutritional quality, safety or environmental impact; the word industrial, on its own, does not answer the question.
“Carbohydrates make you fat.” Body weight changes in relation to energy balance over time, inside a biological and behavioral system that is much more complex. Turning an entire macronutrient into the culprit makes the story simpler, not necessarily better.
“You have to use artificial intelligence because your competitors are already doing it.” It might first be useful to know what for. Technology does not make a decision intelligent simply because it is new.
These are different examples of the same mechanism: complexity is removed because it interferes with the force of the message.
The market for certainty
I have watched it for years in my work. Every era has had the tool that was going to change everything: the website, SEO, Facebook, e-commerce, funnels, data, now artificial intelligence. And to be clear: every one of these things really did change something.
The trick is not to invent something completely false. It is much more effective to take a real transformation and sell it as a universal solution. It works in technology, nutrition, finance, wellness and politics. Wherever a complex problem exists, someone will be willing to reduce it to a simple answer, especially if that answer can be sold.
Defending competence, however, does not mean defending a caste. A degree does not automatically guarantee that someone will remain competent; experience can turn into habit and authority can make people lazy. A young person who studies a field obsessively may know some things far better than someone who stopped updating their knowledge twenty years ago.
Competence is not a status you obtain once and keep forever. It has to be maintained. It requires updating, comparison, mistakes, verification and, above all, a willingness to lose a conviction when the facts no longer support it.
Knowing where what you know ends
The more time passes, the more I regard “I don't know” as a high-quality answer. Not always, obviously: if the surgeon about to operate on me answers that to everything, I'd rather find another surgeon. But boundaries exist, and knowing where your competence ends is part of competence itself.
Since I began using artificial intelligence systems every day, I have found myself confronting this problem even more often. I can get a plausible explanation on almost any subject, but plausibility is dangerous because a well-constructed answer creates the feeling of understanding long before real understanding exists.
AI did not invent the problem. It made it more visible.
There is one final aspect I think about too little: speaking does not carry the same weight when someone makes decisions based on what you say. If I tell friends that I didn't like a restaurant, the consequences are limited. If a hundred thousand people follow me and I claim that a particular food causes a disease, something changes. If I am a consultant and I advise a company to invest one hundred thousand euros, something changes. If I am a politician, doctor, journalist, teacher or science communicator, it changes even more.
Authority should not be only the privilege of being listened to. It should also increase the weight of responsibility: the more people can be influenced by your mistake, the more willing you should be to check what you say.
A slow thing in a fast world
Perhaps competence risks looking unfashionable precisely because it does not scale quickly. You cannot buy it all at once, compress it into a weekend or obtain it by publishing enough content. It is built by studying, doing, getting things wrong, measuring, correcting, asking questions, checking again and changing your mind when necessary.
While everything around us accelerates, this part remains stubbornly slow. And I like that. Perhaps we need something that cannot be accelerated indefinitely.
Of course competence will not literally save the world. It is an exaggerated sentence, but I believe it enough to use it anyway. We have tools that are increasingly powerful and increasingly accessible: in competent hands they can do extraordinary things; used without understanding their limits, consequences and context, they can amplify stupidity with an efficiency we did not have before.
The future does not need less access, but the opposite: more people with access to more knowledge, more tools and more possibilities. Precisely because all of us can do much more, though, we will have to become stricter about distinguishing technical ability from the knowledge required to use it well.
Competence must not become a privilege again. It must become a responsibility.
That is why I keep returning to the same sentence: competence will save the world. Not because those who know should speak in place of everyone else, but because all of us have the right to make decisions based on the work of someone who, before speaking, has at least done the work of understanding.