Knowing Things Is The New Superpower

Why breadth of knowledge matters more than ever in the AI era

TLDR: In the AI era, just knowing that something exists - even without knowing how to do it - became a superpower.

There's a kind of knowledge people have always undervalued: knowing that something exists, without knowing how it actually works.

Before AI, this was already useful. If you knew "there's a thing called X that solves Y", you knew where to dig when the time came. You didn't need to be an expert in everything - you just needed enough breadth to ask the right questions.

But back then, there was still a gap between knowing and doing. You still had to spend weeks learning how to actually build the thing.

AI closed that gap.

The cost of doing is now approaching zero. AI can write the code, draft the design, build the pipeline. But it can only do it if you know to ask. You can't ask for something you don't know exists.

So the bottleneck moved. It's no longer "can you do it?" - it's "do you know it's a thing?"

That's why breadth of knowledge - the kind people used to dismiss as shallow - is now the highest leverage asset you can have. Read widely. Stay curious about things that aren't immediately useful. The returns on just knowing things have never been higher.