AI may make specialists more powerful. It may also make generalists more necessary.

AI may make specialists more powerful. It may also make generalists more necessary.

Hydra — Centaur Org

I recently read (or honestly just listened to) Range by David Epstein and We Are as Gods by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. On my walk today, I tried to put them together and it prompted an organizational question.

We Are as Gods describes the “centaur”: a human working in combination with AI. Building on that idea, think about multiple levels of centaurs working together in human–AI units connected through branching levels to create a Hydra-like organization.

From a distance, this Hydra organization may still resemble a pyramid. Up close, leaders and executives could have numerous interdisciplinary people beneath them, each supported by multiple cross-talking agents.

Now the thought is as someone moves higher, deep specialization may become less valuable than range: the ability to connect disciplines, challenge assumptions and recognize when several specialist outputs produce a collectively bad answer.

I think this may matter at some point because agentic AI can hallucinate and, akin to HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, occasionally throw someone out an airlock. Worse, one agent could accept another agent’s error, build upon it and pass a polished mistake or, as I like to think of it, a digital golden turd up through the organization.

Consensus is not corroboration when multiple AIs and people copy the same hallucination.

Future leaders may therefore need enough interdisciplinary knowledge to ask better questions, spot contradictions and recognize when a machine-generated answer does not survive contact with reality.

AI could make expertise abundant. Could broad judgment then become the scarce resource?

Sources:

• David Epstein, *Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World • Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, [We Are as Gods](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/We-Are-as-Gods/Peter-H-Diamandis/Exponential-Technology-Series/9781668099544)*

Anyway, as my first publish in a while take it easy on me. I have more thoughts on the topic of Organizational Behaviour and AI and think I’ll try to post again soon.

Cheers,

Dale and Hal