Something Is Different About 2026
Author: Dan Koe Type: Newsletter essay
Core Premise
AI is compounding faster than previous technological shifts. The gap between early adopters and waiters is no longer linear — it's exponential and already visible. The question isn't whether to adapt, but how.
Three Types of People in a Technological Shift
- The resisters — identity attached to the old way; see AI as a threat; rage-post about the death of craft
- The waiters — believe it will "blow over"; dependent on external direction; the gap compounds against them every quarter
- The curious — stay curious, experiment, build, find how to adopt AI in their own way without romanticizing the past
Why This Shift Is Different
Historical pattern: skills abstract upward. Scribes → editors. Hand-weavers → machine operators. Typesetters → designers. Each wave of technology pushed humans to operate at a higher level of abstraction.
What's different now: the timescale is compressed. Printing press took decades across Europe. Industrial Revolution unfolded over a century. AI is moving faster than all of them. The compound interest of early adoption is already visible month-to-month.
Skills Abstracting Up a Layer
Even writing — Dan's own craft — is shifting. AI handles the labor (research, surfacing patterns, drafting) while the writer controls the thinking: the direction, the impact, the judgment of what matters.
"The difference between average and great is taste. When anyone can produce anything, choosing what deserves to exist becomes the skill."
Average, competent writing is now commoditized at $20/month. The ceiling hasn't moved. What makes writing great — originality of thought, unmistakable voice, making someone see something new — remains scarce and human.
AI has a skill curve. Most people try it once, get mediocre output, and conclude it doesn't work. Using AI at peak capacity requires experimentation, failure, and finding workflows that match how you think.
What to Actually Learn in 2026
Devon Eriksen's "liberating arts" — skills free people have always needed:
- Logic — deriving truth from known facts
- Statistics — understanding data implications
- Rhetoric — persuading, and spotting persuasion tactics
- Research — gathering information on unknown subjects
- Psychology — discerning true motives of self and others
- Investment — managing and growing assets
- Agency — deciding what to pursue and acting without permission
Three things that demand all of these at once:
- Build your own thing and put it in front of people — forces rhetoric, psychology, agency
- Write publicly, consistently — forces logic, research; builds compounding assets
- Use AI to do things you couldn't do before, not just things you didn't want to do — the edge goes to people expanding capacity, not just avoiding labor
For utility-based tasks, use AI freely. For meaning-based tasks, be careful that AI isn't being used to avoid the struggle that creates skill and meaning.
Key Entities
- Dan Koe — author
Related Sources
- how-to-articulate-yourself-intelligently — articulation as the core skill
- im-begging-you-to-write-more-essays — writing as thinking; the meaning economy
- the-cost-of-staying — career transitions in the AI era