"Average” is dead!

Average in our lives constitutes the majority, quite obviously. Most of humanity lives an average life, they do average jobs, they have average skills/ talent, they are of average physical dimensions, etc. Businesses operated mostly with average capability staff doing their work and getting remunerated. Roughly about 9% of staff would be  above average and then some below average. Not that this model was bad, many large corporations have emerged over the past 200 years or so. To make a living with an average lifestyle or to get an average job, you didn't necessarily have to be exceptional or brilliant, you could be average and get all that. And this for most people was / has been great - The Great American Dream. Even with the industrial age, Information age, social media, the Average formula has somehow survived. We have had average engineers, average programmers, average graphic artists, etc, still making a decent living.

But something seismic is happening now, starting in 2022, since the arrival of ChatGPT (and slightly before with GPT 3). Anyone (most of those reading the post) who has tried the modern generative AI tools, LLMs, chatGPT, can vouch that they can now get a lot of tasks done from these tools. The tasks which are more or less average in complexity and need an average quality output (may be slightly above too in some cases). Imagine a task that needs you to go through the sheets of data with numbers and figure out a pattern / correlations can now easily be obtained from these LLMs, something that might have required an analyst or somebody with average or decent number crunching skills. Same thing goes with creating paragraphs of grammatically correct texts or basic images with certain types of branding. Even for the programming code, LLMs have gotten to state that they can produce quite decent production quality output. 

Do we need human labour producing average quality of work, when we have these machines churning that out and progressing way faster than humans can learn? I think this is one of the most serious events in our human history which will have a very significant impact. I know that we had many pivotal moments which threatened to wipe out many jobs and they did too. But this AI moment feels different and much more significant. In the earlier eras, it has mostly impacted physical labour and later parts of repetitive clerical work. The tasks that needed any kind of creativity or any complex logic have been human-led mostly. 

So ladies and gentlemen, gather around. There is some news for all of us, and it ain’t pretty. Average, the backbone of mediocrity, has finally kicked the bucket. And if you’re sitting there thinking, “Hey, I’m average!” well, buckle up, because the world’s got plans for you—and none of them involve keeping you employed. Have you seen lately if anyone is hiring people where they think that GPT or Gemini can probably do a good enough job? 

Be “Above-Average”

The “Average” as we knew it, is gone, it’s dead. A new Average is being formed with a much higher bar. While average jobs, talent, skills are at a serious risk in the near future, being above average is a great antidote for surviving and perhaps emerging victorious. 

Be above average. Be exceptional. If you are great at writing or art or coding or anything, you will find space for yourself. 

The future belongs to the outliers, the innovators, the “above-average.” So if you want to survive—and maybe even thrive—you’ve got to step up your game. Because here’s the deal: AI might be better at being average, but it’s got a long way to go before it’s exceptional. And until that day comes, the above-average folks will still have a seat at the table.

So, get out there and be better than average. Hell, be way better. Because average isn’t just dead—it’s been replaced, and its replacement works 24/7, doesn’t take lunch breaks, and doesn’t give a damn about the Great American Dream.