Main idea

Naval Ravikant defines specific knowledge through a test of transmission: if a school can teach it to you, it can teach it to someone else, and that someone can replace you. The replacement, in that formulation, is a human trained through the same channel.

A general-purpose assistant shifts the test. What threatens is no longer only what can be taught, but everything that can be described well enough to be handed over — and that includes tasks nobody learned at school, tasks that passed for craft acquired through experience.

The criterion hardens without changing nature: what is specific is what cannot be transmitted, and the set of what can be transmitted has just widened. The question put to someone becomes: if AI is enough to do what you've been given, what remains of you in that work?

Why it matters

It forces a re-examination of skills thought to be safe because they weren't taught. The absence of training proved nothing: it only indicated that no institution had taken it on.

And it redirects the effort. Looking for what still resists is worth more than defending a border drawn at a time when the only possible replacement was a graduate.

Nuances and limits

The test also serves as defensive rhetoric: we declare unformalizable whatever we don't want to see delegated. Nothing in the statement separates the real limit from the protection of a position.

Open questions

What, in a given trade, resists description to the point of not being delegable — and is that resistance durable or only current?