AI and Expertise: Why Public Debate Misses the Real Problem

• The public debate on AI focuses on machines surpassing human judgment, a question decades from resolution.
• AI systems are not replacing expertise but dissolving the social distance that makes expertise legible, creating a perception problem.
• True expertise involves pattern-recognition heuristics gained through years of experience and real consequences, not just information.
• Large language models learn the linguistic surface of expertise, optimizing for plausibility, which is not correctness.
• The real danger is plausible AI outputs accumulating, shifting behavior and eroding deference before errors are detected, leading to a judgment problem.