The synthesiser's wager
Specialisation is safe, respectable, and increasingly automatable: the deeper and more well-defined the expertise, the more it looks like exactly the output machines are learning to produce. The generalist makes a different bet — that the valuable problems live between fields, in the gaps no department owns.
I'm a generalist by temperament: broad, conceptual, more interested in how things connect than in how any one thing works in isolation. For most of history that was a polite word for unemployable, and it still might be. Breadth with no depth is just being shallow about more things, and I'm aware that's the failure mode I have to watch — the synthesiser who can talk about everything and do nothing.
But the bet I'm actually placing is that as AI floods the world with cheap specialist output, the scarce skill becomes knowing which outputs matter, what they mean together, and what to ask for next. Someone who can read a balance sheet, reason about a system's architecture, and tell which of the two is lying sees things the specialists on either side miss.
I might be wrong about that. It's the wager I'm making, though, so I'd rather say it plainly than pretend I'm hedging. Breadth used to be a luxury. I'm betting it's becoming the edge — and putting my own time on the table to find out.