The Second Career Peak

Dean Keith Simonton spent four decades documenting the inverted-U arc of creative productivity: rising sharply in the early career as skills mature, reaching a peak, then declining gradually as the physical and cognitive effort of execution consumes increasing bandwidth and energy yields diminishing returns. But Simonton was careful to show that the decline is driven by execution constraints, not by any deterioration in the creator’s underlying creative capacity. The judgment that filters creative output—the taste, the architectural instinct, the embodied understanding of what a good solution feels like—continues to accumulate even as the rate of production declines, because judgment is built from the total career rather than the current rate of output. AI removes the execution constraint. When implementation becomes cheap, the bottleneck that suppressed late-career productivity is eliminated, and what surfaces is the judgment that was always there, now operating at the scale the tool allows. Simonton’s equal-odds baseline predicts that if this freed judgment constitutes genuine creative engagement—if the amplified output