Skills are the new currency

Issue 241: Licensing human capability and intelligence

Apr 13, 2025

One of the most anticipated sequels during my younger years was The Matrix: Reloaded, the follow-up to the 1999 Keanu Reeves film that had already cemented itself as a sci-fi classic. Though visually stunning with high-octane action scenes, I felt underwhelmed by it, but this is not a movie review. One of the characters they introduced was Seraph, a pivotal protector in the world of The Matrix. I learned years later that the role was designed for legendary martial artist Jet Li, who rejected the role, which eventually went to Collin Chou.

Li turned down the role because the filmmakers wanted to digitally capture and own his martial arts choreography. While the opportunity was massive, Li balked at the idea that a studio could archive his movements, effectively owning his life’s work and repurposing it indefinitely. “We martial artists can only grow older,” he said, “yet they could own (my moves) as intellectual property forever.” In hindsight, Li’s refusal feels remarkably prescient. What he resisted then is now at the heart of conversations around generative AI and digital likeness.

NCAA Football 1999 and games before the NIL case only showed numbers, not the names of the players.

Attribution and credit to any craft is not a new phenomenon. In collegiate sports, there was a decade-plus long lawsuit known as the Ed O’Bannon case, which challenged the NCAA’s ban on compensating college athletes for the use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL), after O’Bannon saw himself featured in an EA Sports video game without pay. The 2014 ruling found that the NCAA’s rules violated antitrust laws, helping pave the way for future NIL reforms. It marked a turning point in how college athletes are viewed, not just as students, but as individuals with marketable rights. Despite the “win” of the case, the players eligible for the lawsuit outcome were only compensated with less than $10,000 as a one-time payment.

In 2016, Star Wars: Rogue One was released with a scene of the iconic Grand Moff Tarkin in the prequel to A New Hope. There was one issue, however: Peter Cushing, the legendary actor who portrayed the Imperial commander, passed away 22 years prior. What was released was a CGI-generated portrayal of the actor with quite an uncanny valley.

As models increasingly train on the labor of artists, writers, and performers, new questions emerge around consent, ownership, and compensation. Li’s stance wasn’t just about martial arts, it was about control over the soul of your craft in a world where replication is effortless.

That tension is now at scale. When everyone can build everything with AI, the scarcity shifts. Execution is no longer the bottleneck—taste, judgment, and originality are. And that’s why I believe foundational human skills are becoming the new currency.

Take H&M’s announcement that they’ll create digital twins of 30 models. While the models retain rights to their likeness, key jobs in greater iconic photoshoots, such as photographers, stylists, and the rest of the crew, could be rendered obsolete. What happens when the commercial value of a person becomes detached from their physical presence?

This may sound like science fiction, but it’s already unfolding. When technology commoditizes an industry, one of three paths tends to occur. The first is that the entire industry may collapse entirely, replaced by more efficient systems. Computer word processing did this to the typewriter industry. The second path may be the remaining artifacts of the disrupted industry that increase in value due to scarcity, such as mechanical watches in the digital watch age. Third, entirely new economies and creative surfaces emerge from the disruption. I’m not arguing for one outcome over another, but these are the common patterns we see.

As generative AI continues to expand what’s possible for anyone to create, the most valuable asset may no longer be how much you can produce, but the quality, meaning, and how uniquely you think. Foundational skills like discernment, storytelling, and design intuition are no longer just ways to shape output. They are the product.

Commoditizing your skills

Consider this: we are doing this already in a mundane way without AI. Any person selling a course, doing consulting, or selling a digital product in any way is commoditizing their skills they believe are valuable.

Licensing human intelligence

We’ve long accepted that musicians can license beats, melodies, and samples. But what happens when we start applying that model to cognition? Imagine a future where a UX designer licenses their way of solving interface problems—an aesthetic judgment API. Or a therapist licenses their method of guiding a conversation, embodied in a chatbot that mimics their voice and approach.

This isn’t about monetizing outcomes. It’s about a valuing approach. The IP isn’t just what you create—it’s how you create it. Your worldview, methodology, and decision-making frameworks could become the licensed layer, not just the artifact you produced.

Your skills as a module

In this future, foundational skills might become modular—think of them as plugins for AI systems. You might not hire a strategist in the traditional sense, but you might integrate their framework into your product stack. Need help prioritizing your roadmap? Load the “first-principles PM” module. Want to generate a story world with internal coherence? Snap in the “novelist worldview” engine.

These aren’t just prompt templates—they’re encoded forms of human judgment. Your skill doesn’t get replaced; it gets abstracted, amplified, and distributed.

Outsourcing your digital twin

Let’s return to H&M’s digital models. While the individuals retain their rights, this raises a deeper question: What happens when the most valuable version of you is a digital one? When is your presence decoupled from your labor?

We’re entering an era where people will train models on how they speak, decide, and create, effectively generating personal APIs. In that world, owning your “digital twin” becomes owning your intellectual property. Just as actors fought for rights to their likeness under SAG-AFTRA, we may soon see similar protections demanded by designers, strategists, and domain experts.

Unique skills are the differentiator

I wonder if Jet Li would’ve made a different decision if his choreography had been treated not as a one-time capture, but as licensed IP, valued, protected, and compensated accordingly. Who knows? He might still have turned it down. But he saw early what we’re now being forced to reckon with: that our most irreplaceable asset is our skills.

As AI saturates creative and operational domains, the rarest trait becomes being deeply, idiosyncratically human. Whether you use AI or not, what you choose to create and bring into the world represents what you stand for. Digital twins, voice clones, even the humble “pick your brain” email all point to one thing: the value of your ability is rising. The difference now is you may have a say in how it’s used and a share in what it creates.

Am I thrilled about this future? No. Working in AI doesn’t mean you have to agree with every development, but I believe it’s the evolving future and choose to help shape the implications of it.

Generative AI has flattened the effort curve. You no longer need to be a seasoned video editor to create a cinematic sequence or a programmer to ship a full-stack app. There lies the challenge of new originality. For skills to be perceived as valuable in the AI-native world, you need to be better than what AI can allow everyone to create. It’s sometimes sloppy and generic, but don’t underestimate the general population compromising for quick and cheap.

But if everyone can do everything, how do we distinguish good from great? That’s where we come in. Taste, context, ethics, and lived experiences are the new moat.