Excellent advice from the early internet era on how to deal with the changes set in motion by the technology also applies to the advent of AI, argues Rix Groenboom.
While I was sleeping, Marcel, who runs a small toy store, went from browsing 30-thousand-dollar e-commerce development quotes to launching his own custom web application in three days using AI coding assistants.
“While I was sleeping” is the opening phrase of the book “The world is flat: a brief history of the twenty-first century” by Thomas Friedman. In 2005, when the book came out, Marcel would have needed to hire developers from the newly connected global workforce the author described – perhaps a team in Bangalore or Eastern Europe who could build his e-commerce platform for a fraction of the costs in the West. The flattening of the IT services world that Friedman witnessed had given Marcel access to global talent pools, but he was still fundamentally a customer, not a creator.
But while I was sleeping, something more profound happened. Two decades after Friedman’s publication, Marcel doesn’t need to outsource to that global workforce anymore; he’s become that global workforce. Armed with AI coding assistants, he’s transformed from someone who consumed technology services to someone who creates them, iterating in real-time and customizing every detail himself.
This is flattening at warp speed. Friedman’s original ten flatteners connected people to global markets and global talent. But AI, the eleventh flattener, does something unprecedented: it doesn’t just give you access to expertise, it gives you the expertise itself.
Friedman warned that intellectual jobs – accounting, radiology, legal research, software development – were at risk because this work could be done anywhere in the world with cheaper labor and high-speed internet. If your job can be digitized and transmitted, he said essentially, someone else can do it for less.
AI has flipped this equation entirely. Marcel didn’t outsource his web development to compete with global labor costs; he eliminated the need for that labor altogether. The same AI tools that threaten to automate intellectual jobs also democratize intellectual capabilities.
For those of us in the knowledge economy watching Marcel’s transformation, the implications are both thrilling and unsettling. The radiologist Friedman said could be replaced by someone reading scans in India might now worry about AI reading those scans entirely. The lawyer who watched legal research move offshore now sees entrepreneurs drafting contracts themselves with AI guidance.
But here’s what Friedman understood about previous waves of flattening: the solution isn’t to resist the change; it’s to climb higher up the value chain. Marcel can build his toy store app and handle basic tasks, but he still needs professionals for complex integrations, strategic advice, regulatory compliance and high-stakes decision-making.
Two decades after Friedman’s warning about job displacement through globalization, we’re witnessing something far more profound: not just the movement of jobs, but the multiplication of human capability itself. The flattening doesn’t eliminate expertise; it elevates what expertise means.
We’re not being replaced; we’re being freed from routine work to focus on what humans uniquely bring: judgment, creativity, relationship-building and navigating complexity that goes beyond pattern recognition. The world isn’t just flat anymore; it’s intelligent. And in an intelligent world, the most valuable professionals will be those who can harness that intelligence to solve problems that still require the irreplaceable human touch.
Marcel’s three-day coding sprint represents more than technological progress. It’s the emergence of a world where capability itself has been democratized, where the question isn’t who can access global talent, but who can best amplify their own potential with artificial intelligence as their co-pilot.
