There are going to be several deaths of expertise. A couple of them are going to happen purposefully. A few somewhat unintentionally.
The first death is to say there are no experts. Not true.
The second death is to say we are all capable of experts by "doing your own research". <SMH>
The goldilocks death is by accepting experts that are not quite experts and then slowly infecting all expert voices as to not have credibility.
The first thing to think about is what is expertise. Today the gradient of scholarship on a given topic varies and is somewhat a land grab of all the topics that would make the true expert criteria. Today we call experts prematurely with years and some niche of knowledge that you can rightly say, yeah they know what they are talking about, but then they are asked to speculate. This is when expertise dies. We lose credibility. You are an expert when you stop at the edge of your knowledge. Disclaiming does not help unless you put LOTS of assumptions to help bound the listener and to color your perspective.
We need to know what to call an expert and determine if it is just highly experienced in a specific area.
It is a combination of training and experience. But what does that truly mean? It is too broad a statement. You need to have training, sure, but that needs to be both instruction, research, synthesis and application. It needs to include setting up a system, machine, or a business, including all facets of implementation. It needs to include failure and then how to recover from that failure.
All of these are signs of an educational life, well lived. Further, it means you are a life long learner.
That being said, I question how many experts do we have? I know what I defined is a bunch of arbitrary criteria, but think of the people who really know their shit. The first thing they tell you is that they learned through failure.
The death of expertise is going to happen when we put ourselves out there over our skis and then the armchair GPT clickers use their output to profess or protest.
We must fight this as we would any assault. Vehemently and without pause.
In order for the GPT phenomena to happen the environment has to be normalized where the opinion on the science has the same validity in the media as the science itself. This needs to be quashed.
Expertise needs to get back to its roots. We need to say things are incorrect and not worry about feelings. We say it from a position of knowledge and not of harm. We chide the tendency to soothe feelings and let them know why they are wrong. Because as experts we educate and teach with empathy. It is no different than correcting the spelling of a young student.
We have let the library which is the internet to dumb us down. To take the first entry as gospel without realizing that the gospel is based on some pretty well misunderstood or regurgitation of perspectives and not scientific or historical methodology.
Facts are stubborn things. Opinions on facts can make for stimulating or mind numbing conversation. But in the end we need to disarm them as if left to persist they can hurt people unwittingly.