Personal tokens
will eat the world

Prologue

AI promises a world of abundance & prosperity, but without a new kind of financial instrument AI will tear society apart at the seams.

This is the story of that instrument: the personal token. A personal token represents an individual's potential. It enables individuals to raise capital today in exchange for equity in their future upside (grounded in the equities in companies and other personal tokens they will earn). A seemingly simple instrument that will change the course of humanity.

In this essay I explore why we need personal tokens, how personal tokens will eat the world, and how we will create and scale personal tokens to everyone.

Extreme outcomes

AI makes outcomes very extreme: a small percentage of people will be responsible for the majority of economic value created in the world. The more powerful AI becomes, the more extreme outcomes become: even fewer will be responsible for the majority of economic value created. The more extreme outcomes become, the less room there is for the average performer to create value, and the greater the outcomes become for the best.

This trend towards extreme outcomes isn't a new phenomenon, it's been going on for some time. Counterintuitively, it's caused by progress: better technology, better education, easier distribution of ideas and products make the world more extreme. But, AI is poised to accelerate the rate at which the world becomes extreme to unfathomable levels that will make today's extreme outcomes seem quite un-extreme.

To understand why outcomes are becoming more extreme, we need to understand the relationship between the complexity of work and its outcomes. Simple tasks have more equal outcomes: 100 factory workers assembling the same product will not have that much variance in their outcomes: the best performers will only be marginally faster or better. On the other hand, complex tasks have very extreme outcomes in which a few individuals account for the major majority of the value created. For example, if we take 1 billion YouTube content creators, only a tiny fraction of them will generate the majority of the revenue on the platform. We see such extreme outcomes in any complex task: building companies, making music, creating content, writing books, etc. Extreme outcomes don't have room for the average which is why there is no "middle class" for complex work: the average startup, musician, or content creator cannot make a sustainable living through their crafts. They either become quite successful or make little to nothing.

The more complex the task, the more extreme the outcomes.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes our work more complex by doing the simpler work for us, forcing us to move up the "complexity ladder". For example, within a couple of years AI will write most of the code written. As this happens, programmers will be pushed towards more complex work: figuring out what to build, understanding users, their needs & emotions, design, high level architecture, etc. In other words, as AI becomes more powerful, programmers will be forced to operate more like startup founders rather than as programmers. And we already know that the role of a startup founder is highly complex because of how extreme the outcomes for startups are. We will see a similar pressure towards more complex work in all domains. Video editors will need to be able to make unique contributions to the overall story and engagement rather than just executing the director's idea. Marketers will need to be able to create powerful ad campaigns. Customer support agents will need to be able to train and manage AI teammates to support many product areas rather than handle a question at a time.

All work is becoming highly complex ⇒ all work will have extreme outcomes. AI is accelerating exponentially fast. Even when we estimate progress conservatively, within the next few years outcomes for all knowledge work will be very, very extreme. Though AI is largely restricted to the digital realm today, it's only a matter of time before AI can directly manipulate the physical world and thus make outcomes for most human endeavors very extreme.

Another way to understand why the world is becoming more extreme is that AI scales each individual to the world. One of the best programmers in the world will soon be able to train an AI being to represent them (i.e. their intuition, judgement, taste, etc.) such that anyone can access it as a paid service that would be better than, and a fraction of the cost of, hiring a programmer. Even scaling 10 - 20% of the best's skill (which we are close to) will likely outcompete the majority of people on that skill. Similarly, the best designers will be able to make themselves accessible to millions of builders. Similarly, the best biryani chef will train AI to physically reproduce their biryani anywhere on the planet in minutes. In such a world, why would someone buy anything from anyone other than one of the best? Similar to how we have only two ride-sharing apps (in a region), two mobile platforms, a few profitable content creators for any category, etc. there will only be room the best in every activity.

AI will create more jobs than it takes. Every technological advancement enables us to create things that were previously impossible, and historically the growth of such new opportunities has outstripped the loss of others. I predict the same will happen with AI: there will be far more possibilities to create value for each other in a post-AI world. There will be far more opportunities than ever before, but, because each new opportunity will be much more complex, it will become more difficult to do it well enough to be able to create value. In other words, there will be many more "games" to play, but each game will have fewer "winners" (i.e. more extreme outcomes). Counterintuitively, in absolute terms, there will be more winners than ever before (because there will be more activities than ever before), yet the world will be much more extreme because most value will be captured by a small percentage within each activity.

Many incorrectly believe that extreme outcomes is a temporary phenomena: a bug that we will eventually "fix". But, I don't see this happening because any complex activity even with equal opportunity will have extreme outcomes (just imagine the outcomes of 1000 people with access to the same resources trying to make, say, music). Extreme outcomes is an inherent feature of complex skills. The actual problems to focus on are insufficient median outcome (everyone must have basic needs met) and equal opportunity (an individual's background and wealth should have no bearing on their ability to succeed). But solving these problems will not lead to more equal outcomes. In fact such a world will be far more extreme. To go back to more equal outcomes (and the middle class that comes with it) requires us to not adopt new technologies such as AI that make our work more complex, or tax extreme outcomes so aggressively as to disincentivize creation. Such societies will fail, and fail much faster as change accelerates.

Outcomes will only become more extreme.

Opportunity becomes concentrated

In an extreme world, debt is death since most won't be able to pay it back. We need a better way to finance human activity so that individuals aren't burdened by debt by the time they're ready to start contributing to the world. In fact, we need need to do better than no debt: individuals should have access to all the resources they need to realize their potential.

As I type this, there are millions of students taking on debt to pay for education who will be crushed by the extreme job market. Many families around the world view education as the most certain way to rise in the world, and who can blame them, investing in education has had consistent returns for decades. They're betting everything they own, taking on serious debt, to help finance their children'n educations in the hopes that everything will pay off eventually. Sadly… most will be crushed by extreme outcomes.

This is terrible for all of us. Wealth is concentrated while talent is equally distributed. This means that most of the minds that are capable of solving humanity’s greatest challenges don’t have wealth. The minds that are most capable of solving global warming, diseases, governance, superintelligence, etc. won’t be born into wealth. Without a better system that identifies and nurtures human potential regardless of the wealth they come from, we will struggle to solve our collective challenges in time. Democratizing opportunity is necessary for humanity to survive and thrive — especially in the age of AI in which each individual is more powerful than ever before: losing even one gem of a mind to poverty, war, addiction, or something stupid can set our species back by centuries.

(TODO: qualify this: "IF" we don't have a radically different way to finance our lives, opportunity becomes concentrated).

The world must run on VC

In an extreme world, venture capital is the only viable way to finance human activity.

Venture capital is a popular form of financing in the startup world: investors give companies money in exchange for equity in the company. If the company goes on to win, its investors profit. Given how extreme outcomes are for startup outcomes, some investors can make many orders of magnitude more money than they invested. A single win can bankroll an investor’s entire career.

Venture capital works exceptionally well in domains with extreme outcomes because an investor only needs a few of their bets to win in order to more-than-compensate for the many failed bets they will inevitably have. At the same time, founders raising capital by giving up equity in their companies can take greater risk without the fear of being crushed by failure (as they won’t take on debt if they lose). Venture capital and extreme outcomes is a marriage made in heaven.

But, venture capital (as it works today) is too restrictive: you must be ready to start a startup in order to raise capital. We need to enable venture capital much more broadly and earlier. Any individual should be able to raise VC well before they have a specific idea, or before they’re even ready to join or start a company — based on their potential.

Without enabling venture capital earlier, those that come from wealth have a massive, growing, advantage. By the time an individual gets the point where they raise capital for their company, their massive advantages throughout life compound aggressively. It’s far easier to get into Stanford as a rich kid, which gives you much easier to access venture capital and a strong network of peers, which means you have more swings. In an extreme world, small advantages are amplified extremely, meaning that such privileges will become near-insurmountable advantages.

We need a new financial instrument that brings venture capital to everyone so that everyone has the opportunity to discover and realize their potentials, so that the opportunities that AI will create will be accessible to all… unlocking humanity’s potential.

The personal token

A personal token represents an individual’s potential. It is grounded in its owner’s equities in companies and personal tokens. An individual can sell shares of their personal token to investors to give them equity in their upside.

For example, Alice a promising young designer could seek great mentors who she wants to learn from and have them invest in her personal token. Let’s say she finds 3 investors and sells each 1% equity in her personal token, raising a total of $200k. Alice can then use this capital to finance bold experimentation (or even education) without worrying about being crushed the downside because she’s shared her risk with investors in exchange for some of her upside.

The value of a personal token is grounded in reality: whenever Alice sells equity in companies or other personal tokens, her shareholders get a small cut of her capital gains proportional to the equity they hold in Alice’s personal token. Alice’s shareholders can also sell their equity to other investors (with Alice’s permission) in case they want to cash out.

Personal tokens enable promising individual to raise capital well before they even have a specific idea to work on, purely based on their potential. Such an instrument creates a marketplace for potential that incentivizes capital and mentorship to flow into the hands of the brightest, regardless of the wealth they are born into.

*Read more about how personal tokens work.*

Phase 1: Eats SF

Personal tokens will start off as a fun new toy in San Francisco: the only place in the world with the abundance of capital and sufficient craziness to play with a new instrument like this. In the early days, most outside of this city will at best view personal tokens as another stupid experiment in the sea of “waste” that San Francisco produces. Many will hate personal tokens.

The starting point probably won’t even look like it’s democratizing opportunity because the first ones to build their lives on personal tokens will likely come from privilege. Why? Because even trying out weird things and taking risk requires you to come from a certain amount of wealth. Those that don’t have to stress about paying for food and rent will naturally have a greater risk appetite to try out personal tokens. The average middle class person around the world doesn’t grasp venture capital, let alone personal tokens.

Whether we like it or not, democratization often starts with the rich. Computers, smartphones and the internet started off as expensive toys that only the rich (and by rich I’m not talking about your wealth relative to other citizens in your country, but your wealth relative to the global average. The average poor person in the US is still globally rich.) got to play with. But, eventually, these technologies penetrated the entire world and democratized access to knowledge and the ability to create for all. Kings from just a century ago couldn’t have dreamt of the kind of power that lies in the hands of almost every human being today. Similarly, personal tokens will start off as another toy for the rich and crazy in the wealthiest, most abundant, city in the world before it penetrates the world and democratizes opportunity for everyone.

Phase 2: Eats Education

To see how personal tokens will eat the education system, we need to first understand how AI changes what the world wants from each person. Most of us choose what to learn based on what will enable us to create value for the world. This desire to be useful to the world is deeply programmed in each of us and won’t change in a post AI world.

What the world wants from you

In an extreme world with shrinking room for average performers, individuals can pull on two levers to find their way to creating value:

1. Differentiation: find what you're uniquely capable of offering to the world.
2. Excellence: become one of the best at it.

AI lowers the barrier to create which leads to more people competing in a particular direction which leads to a greater pressure to differentiate if you're not cut out to be one of the best in that direction. But no matter how much you differentiate you will still come across competition and you will have no choice but to strive for excellence in order to be able to create any value.

In an extreme world, people will feel a strong pressure to find what they are uniquely capable of doing that no one else in the world is wired to be able to do as well as them. If there is someone better than you at something, it will become increasingly difficult to compete against them as they scale themselves through AI. The world will paradoxically become more AND less competitive. Those who find their unique differentiation will escape competition. Those who haven't found what they're meant to do will feel smothered by competition.

Our education system fails to enable people to discover their unique differentiation and achieve excellence because it was designed for the industrial and information ages which had ample room for the average to do undifferentiated work. Even today, most graduates go on to do undifferentiated work in Tech / Consulting / Finance, or whatever else is the flavor of the day. True differentiation and excellence is exceptionally rare and an education system that optimizes for this will look very different.

Cost of education skyrockets

Many incorrectly believe that the cost of education will fall as everyone gains access to AI personal tutors that can guide them through humanity's knowledge according to their unique temperament, inclinations, interests, and pace. But, the opposite will happen: the cost of education will skyrocket because the teachers who can meaningfully impact outcomes in ways that AI cannot will become more rare, and far more valued.

Teaching a complex skill is also a complex skill that has extreme outcomes. As work becomes more extreme, finding teachers who are good enough to meaningfully improve student outcomes will become more difficult. And the ones who are good enough to meaningfully impact outcomes will need to be compensated greatly because the outcomes their successful students will generate will be extremely high.

For example, a great product design teacher would improve the chances of their students to go on to creating a product used by billions. Because the advantage they provide can lead to such massive outcomes, the value of improving chances of success by even a little will be worth a lot.

In an extreme, post-AI, world, great teachers' time will be worth far more than what most students can pay. (Note: the converse is also true: in an extreme, post-AI, world: a teacher willing to teach for something a student can afford to pay for is almost certainly not a good enough teacher).

Education’s business model breaks down

Therefore, the business model of selling education as a product that students (customers) pay for is being attacked on two fronts:

1. As outcomes become more extreme, the average student won't be able to earn back what they spend on their degree in time, or at all - making paying for education too risky for most.
2. The more complex our work becomes, the more expensive good teachers become — making quality education unaffordable for everyone except those extremely rich.

Making education free doesn't work because the teachers who can meaningfully impact a student's outcomes will become way too expensive, and therefore the teachers that institutions can afford to hire will almost certainly be the wrong teachers who will harm more than help.

The best way to incentivize the best teachers to train is to give them equity in the upside of their students – by investing in their personal tokens.

A better education system

A new education system will form on top of personal tokens in which teachers become investors in their students’ potential.

What does an education system need? In my view there are four functions of great education. Each supports the others. Each irreplaceable.

1. Discovery: helping a student to discover their unique talents and their natural strengths.
2. Training: helping a student to become excellent at their craft.
3. Community: providing students ambitious, motivated peers who work together and challenge each other. The most valuable learning happens through osmosis with the right peers.
4. Credentialing: helping a student stand out by signaling their competence.

A. Discovery

The more extreme outcomes become, the more necessary it becomes for each individual to discover their unique talents as it will become very difficult to create value if you’re competing with others who are naturally wired to do what you cannot.

When teachers invest in students, they are strongly incentivized to help their students discover what they’re naturally good at because if a student fails, the teacher loses their investment in the student. In other words, having skin in the game forces teachers to optimize for the long-term success of students which requires students discovering their innate strengths.

Personal tokens also incentive “scouts”: individuals whose sole focus is to discover innate talent that individuals themselves may not be able to see. If you can discover that Alice, say, has an innate talent for visual design and invest in her personal token and connect her to excellent teachers for that skill, you will be rewarded greatly.

In an education system built on personal tokens, the system aids individuals to find their unique expressions, as opposed to forcing them into predefined, rigid learning paths — as is the case now as teachers aren’t penalized if students don’t actually go on to create value for themselves.

B. Training

An education system powered by personal tokens gives students greater choice and control over learning path, makes it easier to identify great teachers, and lets students take more ambitious, “weird” learning journeys that may actually be a better fit.

Students will be able to mix and match teachers to help them achieve what they want. For example, a student interested in building products would probably want a teacher-investor who's built and scaled products, and perhaps another who is an incredible designer, and maybe even one to help them train their mind and body for optimal performance.

Teachers are held accountable. They have skin in the game and are directly penalized if their student does not succeed (by the money & time they invested in the student). Teachers cannot hide their incompetence for long because they'll go broke and lose credibility, making it easier for students to identify the right teachers because the ones that survive are more likely to be actually great. Teachers will no longer be insulated from reality, which is good for students and the great teachers alike (who won’t have to work has hard to distinguish themselves from mediocre teachers).

In the same way that Charles Darwin took off on a long voyage to study nature, individuals could raise capital to tinker with a new artistic medium, hone design skills through product design explorations, or build nuclear reactors in their garages, etc. Great teachers would be willing to invest in students to enable such ambitious (and potentially expensive) explorations because they improve likelihood of success in an extreme world in which you need to be unique and sufficiently crazy in order to thrive.

C. Community

The most powerful learning happens within groups of motivated peers. Great teacher-investors would create their own “accelerator” programs for their specific skill by accepting a select group of students to train together, enabling students to both learn from, and push, each other to be better under their mentorship. Teachers can also partner up to invest and mentor together combining student peer groups across skills.

D. Credentialing

There is no signal more powerful than someone with a strong reputation as your personal token shareholder. If a promising designer is invested in by, say, Jony Ive, the world will take notice. Such a signal will be much more powerful than graduating from, say, Stanford because Jony had to actually put his money on the line — which he's unlikely to do unless he actually believes in the student's potential.

Death of colleges

In an extreme, post AI world, colleges, and by extension any education program that doesn’t compensate teachers with equity in upside (i.e. this includes bootcamps that run on income-share-agreements), will not be able to offer education that meaningfully impacts student outcomes. They don’t have the right incentives.

Why would a student PAY money for a worse education (that will become near-useless and obvious to all) than try to RAISE money from the right teachers who will have a verifiable track record of meaningfully impacting outcomes for their students (via returns on their investments)?

Like all big societal transformations, what upends a legacy system is never an adversary that attacks it head on, but rather a change that makes it irrelevant in an unexpected way. AI will make legacy education obsolete by making the world very extreme (and thereby invalidating education’s business model), and personal tokens will enable a new system to take its place: one that gives students many more learning options, one that holds teachers accountable by penalizing poor teachers, one that rewards great teachers fairly, one that enables anyone to access the best education based on potential instead of the wealth they come from, and one that encourages students to dream big and take risks by not pushing them into debt if they fail.

Phase 3: Eats the World

The winning nation

In an extreme post AI world, the outcomes of nations too will be extreme. The most powerful nation will be multiple orders of magnitude more powerful than the next one, leading to an absolute economic and cultural domination the likes of which will make the British empire’s reign seem cute. In an extreme world, average nations will have nothing — similar to how the average content creator or startup founder makes nothing. They will be forced to rely on the winning nation for assistance which will only be given in exchange for joining the winner’s economic system.

The country that adopts personal tokens first will dominate the world. Europeans didn’t colonize the world because they were more “blessed” than the rest of us. They won because they had the right incentives: they invented the notion of a company that led to venture capital financing ambitious explorations, which incentivized a culture that pushed them to “civilize” the rest of the world. I’m only writing this in English while wearing jeans & a t-shirt because the Europeans created the right incentives faster than other cultures.

In a post AI world, the most valuable resources will be human brilliance. One genius will be worth more than all of the Earth’s natural resources combined because they will be able to command a near infinite army of incredibly capable artificially intelligent agents to amplify and scale themselves. The nation that best discovers and enables its talent will be the one that comes out on top. Democratizing opportunity and economic growth go hand in hand.

I’m convinced the personal token is a “universal truth”: if not created now, it will be created sooner or later, in the same way that language, money, companies, computers, internet, and AI were bound to have been created sooner or later. But, how quickly we create and scale a universal truth has great consequences. Similar to how tribes in which money was invented later were less robust and had many more deaths due to the inefficiencies of the barter system, societies that adopt personal tokens more slowly (and continue to be debt driven) will be brutally punished by the extreme outcomes that AI creates.

We must act now.

Universal Basic Equity (UBE)

In a post AI world, in addition to UBI (universal basic income), we will need UBEquity: each human must have an equity stake in the collective.

People hate billionaires today because they don’t directly benefit from them. When each individual has direct equity in everyone else’s upside (which they can trade), we will be more willing to support and cheer each other on. Elon getting to Mars must directly, immediately, raise the value of the assets in the hands of the average Joe in West Virginia (who indirectly holds a stake in Elon’s personal token by having equity in the USAToken), instead of “trickling down” to them at some vague point in the future (which btw never happens because it gets eaten up by pigs along the way).

By giving each citizen equity in the collective, we also incentivize having kids because each new child dilutes everyone’s equity, but increases the total equity that their family captures. The more powerful AI becomes and the more rapidly the economy grows, the stronger the incentive for a family to have children to capture more equity. Without UBE there won’t be a strong financial incentive to have kids which will lead to population collapse (which all developed nations suffer from today). Relying on immigration for population growth isn’t sustainable (zero-sum). We must strongly compensate people for contributing to the growth of our species, and in an extreme world, equity is the only worthwhile compensation.

Addressing concerns

Exploitation

At scale, there will be asshole investors who will want to take advantage of individuals with potential who desperately need money by buying up significant equity in their personal tokens for cheap. We will need strong protections against such behavior. There some design choices that will help such as capping how much personal token equity can be sold (e.g. no more than 20%), verifying the investors who come on board and not accepting people known for asshole behavior, reversing such transactions if we find out later (or court ordered), having a strong reputation system, etc. Similarly, there will be individuals who will try to commit fraud by manipulating investors through lies. We will have to work hard to minimize such exploitation. It will be tough… but we must try.

Culture of optimization and competition

Some may also view such a market based approach for human potential as reductive: pushing individuals to optimize for economic output instead of higher pursuits, but there is always room for artistry: rising above the pressure to optimize for economic output.

In fact, many of the greatest outcomes in any field are products of such artistry, and it's usually the case that those who directly optimize for economic output can't achieve the greatest outcomes because they lack artistry. In my eyes, this paradox is one of the greatest beauties of our world. It's often those that hate "optimizing market forces", that hate the stifling "algorithm", that contribute most to the growth of the market, creating market forces that push others to be like them.

Similarly, while the world seems to be getting more competitive, the ones who will do best will be those who escape competition by doing what they're meant to do, that no one else can compete with them on. Many would be surprised by how little the top founders and creators focus on what their competitors are doing. They are instead focused on creating the best products they can and on understanding their audiences. Obsession with competition is a habit of the average mind. And since there won't be room for the average as the world becomes more extreme, more individuals will be pushed to escape competition.

Therefore, personal tokens and the education system that forms around it will actually discourage the vicious, zero-sum, competition we see all around us, and encourage individuals to discover and lean into their unique talents that no one can compete with them on.

What about people without potential?

There will be many reasons investors wouldn’t want to invest in someone. Even those with exceptional potential will be passed up because they seem too crazy. Some will be passed because their unique talent doesn’t have a strong market today (e.g. underwater basket weaving). Some will be passed on because they’ve been dealt a terrible hand at birth (e.g. those with extremely addictive personalities who can’t accomplish anything, or those with debilitating diseases: physical and mental, etc.) We will definitely need universal basic income + universal basic equity to support people.

At the same time, I also believe that given the right environment and resources, even those who you might think don’t have potential will shine. I believe that there are many people withering away in today’s world not doing much who, if they had somehow been born today, would have thrived in a world with powerful AI and personal tokens. I believe that our descendants will surprise us with their brilliance.

Personal tokens also improves learning for those who investors won’t invest in. Unlike teachers today who share some of their knowledge while keeping some secret (because they sell their knowledge as a product - through courses, etc.), teacher-investors (who invest in students' personal tokens) will be incentivized to share as much as possible, to as many people as possible, without holding back. The value a teacher-investor provides to the students they train isn't knowledge you can consume somewhere, it's the personalized feedback tailored to the student's situation that you can't get from static content - or even the AI's that the teacher trains. The more people teacher-investors reach through content and AI, the more students they will attract and will be able to invest in. Therefore, the new education system will also positively impact students who struggle to be invested in through better learning resources due to better incentives for teachers to scale their teaching. Also, over time a greater percentage of students will become investable as it becomes more clear to everyone what it takes to create value (which today only a tiny percentage of students get).

What about people who don’t want to join / start companies?

Raising capital on personal tokens is restricted to individuals who eventually want to join / start / invest in companies (or invest in other personal tokens) because the value of a personal token is grounded in its owner’s equities in companies and personal tokens.

This makes personal tokens feel restrictive today, but in the long-run personal tokens will work for anyone doing anything because almost all external human activity (i.e. activity outside of interactions & relationships with family and friends) will eventually be organized through companies. This has been an ongoing trend for a while: a decade ago it would be kind of weird for a content creator to have their own company, but today it's the norm for serious creators. Similarly, more ground breaking research is moving from academia to labs structured as companies because the company structure is the best way to align collaboration.

Closing

poop.

Appendix

Extreme outcomes is proportional to complexity

How extreme outcomes are is directly proportional to how complex the skill is. My favorite example to demonstrate this is the outcomes between Chess & Go. It's already known Go is a more complex game than Chess because there are more possible board positions you can end up in (a game of chess can have in the ballpark of 10^120 different permutations, whereas a game of go can have 10^360 ones). This difference in complexity translates to a more extreme distribution of relative skills (measured via ELO ratings) between the top professional players of each game:

And to be clear, this is just the difference in skill. Outcomes (wins / losses) will be far more extreme because small differences in skill lead to outsized differences in wins vs. losses (a player with a 400-point advantage is expected to win about 90% of the time).

It's also difficult to argue that somehow top professional Go players had more resources relative to the average Go players than the top Chess players had relative to the average chess players, leading to more extreme distribution of skill for Go vs. Chess. The reality is that many of the world's greatest players today have had quite similar access to resources at young ages: great computers to train with, and attended reputed training programs run by some of the best coaches.

Therefore, the more extreme differences in ability for Go can only be attributed to the difference in game complexity.

Similarly, if we could plot ELO ratings for programming (e.g. coding puzzles) vs. content creation, we would find that the latter would have a far more extreme distribution of skill than programming that is proportional to the underlying complexity of the task itself.