The journey of making information accessible has always been tied to reducing distribution costs, starting from ancient oral traditions to the modern era of the internet and computing. This progression fundamentally reshaped how knowledge was concentrated and distributed, with profound implications for skills development and access.

The Evolution of Information Accessibility

1. Oral and Early Written Knowledge:
   In ancient times, information was concentrated within communities and controlled by individuals like tribal elders or scribes. Oral traditions or handwritten manuscripts limited access due to the effort and resources required to disseminate knowledge.
2. Printing Press and Books:
   The printing press marked the first significant leap toward reducing the cost of distributing information. For the first time, books could be mass-produced, making knowledge more accessible, but still tied to physical distribution and literacy.
3. Internet and Digital Transformation:
   The internet revolutionized the cost of information distribution, effectively reducing it to zero. Knowledge, once locked in books or centralized institutions, became universally available, crossing geographical and socioeconomic boundaries.

Information Accessibility and Hard Skills

Despite the internet making information available to everyone, hard skills like writing, programming, or scientific understanding still required concentrated effort to master. Access to information alone wasn’t enough—it needed to be processed, practiced, and understood, which demanded significant time and cognitive resources. This created a bottleneck: while information was distributed, the skills remained relatively concentrated among those who could dedicate time and effort.

AI and the Next Frontier: Distributed Skills

Advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs) and automation tools, are now dismantling this bottleneck. Here’s how:

1. Reducing Cognitive and Time Barriers:
   Tools like GitHub Copilot for programming or ChatGPT for writing lower the effort and time needed to perform complex tasks. These systems act as accelerators, enabling individuals with minimal prior knowledge to execute tasks that once required years of training.
2. Enabling Skill Distribution:
   AI bridges the gap between information and skill application. It democratizes access to capabilities that previously required concentrated expertise, allowing skills to become as distributed as information itself.
3. Creating a Fully Distributed Model:
   With the time and effort to acquire hard skills decreasing dramatically, the future will see an unprecedented leveling of the playing field. Skills will no longer be concentrated among select individuals or institutions but will be accessible and usable by anyone with basic access to AI tools.

Implications for the Future

This shift heralds a new era where the barriers to skill acquisition are minimal, enabling broader participation in traditionally specialized fields. However, it also shifts the emphasis from merely possessing hard skills to leveraging uniquely human traits—creativity, adaptability, and interpersonal connections—that cannot be easily commoditized.

In this landscape, the true differentiator will no longer be what you know or can do (as these are increasingly automated), but how effectively you can combine distributed tools with human ingenuity to create, innovate, and connect.