The Competency Cliff

My colleague Rex Widmer is on the front lines of technology in EMS. We were recently talking about how transformational artificial intelligence will be, and I shared a concern about how quickly its greatest advantage could disappear.

Those of us who learned to do the work the hard way bring something essential to AI: we know what good work looks like. We can spot a bad answer, identify what’s missing, and fix the result. AI multiplies that competence. Work that once took hours can take minutes.

I think we’re entering an extraordinary period for experienced people willing to embrace these tools.

I also think that period could be short.

The people coming behind us may learn their professions with AI doing much of the work from the beginning. Their output could look polished long before they develop the judgment to evaluate it. If they never learn how to produce or repair that work themselves, the quality of the AI becomes the ceiling of their own ability.

I call that the Competency Cliff.

It’s a concern I explore in Terminal Autonomy. A system can handle increasingly complicated decisions while the people using it get fewer opportunities to develop the judgment those decisions require. Every successful automated decision gives us another reason to trust the next one.

Eventually, someone has to recognize an exception, challenge a recommendation, or take over. That moment demands competence built through practice—including mistakes, corrections, and understanding why an answer works.

This creates a difficult problem for training. We want new people to use tools that make their work faster and better. We also need them to develop the skills to question those tools. The slow, frustrating parts of learning often build exactly that ability.

I’m enthusiastic about what AI lets me accomplish. My conversation with Rex left me thinking about how we pass along the expertise that makes it so useful.

We have a generation of people who can teach both the work and the tools. We should use that opportunity while we have it.

The Competency Cliff is coming fast.