Artificial Intelligence and the end of “knowledge work”
Future of work in an AI-ascendant world
Artificial Intelligence is set to fundamentally change the nature and future of work. While debates about AI’s present capabilities may might lead to diversion and doubt, AI will have an unparalleled influence, particularly on “knowledge work” that has characterized the recent decades.
Using a gardening analogy, our current conditions are ideal for AI to emerge. Humans are adding a helping hand, and the plant, once set, will have enough of its own sentience to become a mighty tree.
In this post, I explore why AI poised to radically alter work, where it’s impact will be felt most, and why we must pay attention.
Since we are going to be talking about AI, let’s start off a definition. Encyclopedia Britannica defines Artificial Intelligence as:
the ability of a digital computer…to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason…generalize, or learn from past experience.
The phrases of note are: intellectual prowess and ability to learn or reason. This distinguishes AI from prior information technologies.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has existed for decades, but recent developments have made it more concrete and relevant through the rise of LLMs such as ChatGPT and Gemini. This exposure has popularized the term ‘AI’, imbuing it with a sense of infinite capability, and possibility.
Economy
Trends
Technology has always been a part of our personal lives. It’s impact however is most palpable when it impacts jobs.
The Western world is grappling with economic slowdown. Many job cuts are ascribed to AI. While there may be elements of truth, I don’t feel AI applications have had the capability or refinement, to directly cause the job cuts and shutdowns of the last 2 years, even if they were pre-empted anticipating the long-term AI-based future.
Job losses in the Western world are due to a multitude of factors. After COVID lockdowns, economies and supply chains have struggled to recover. Cost of living crisis, weak demand, quantitative easing, recession, stagflation — it’s a vicious economic word-soup out there.
Societal trends complicate things further. Self-righteousness emanating from woke ideologies is one. The second, more powerful one, is the impacts of arrangements like Work From Home. Many people claim WFH makes them more productive, but its impact on overall organizational productivity, and the wider economy is debatable. Then there is “quiet quitting”, social activism by employees etc.
Impact
As the economic crunch hits, pressure on producing real earnings and real profits increases. Governments are being forced to downsize. There is already top-down pressure on jobs. The new sensitives and reconditioning of people is now creating bottom-up pressures also.
Remote working at the same time is getting more acceptable. 2 + 2 = 4. Employers are recognizing that if a job can be performed from home, it might also be outsourced to another country where labor costs are lower, leading to offshoring. AI of course can take this one step further and eliminate the need for human labor in numerous job functions.
While the growing capabilities of AI provide a tempting alternative to employers in today’s tight economic environment, AI is not decimating jobs at the moment: socio-economic conditions are.
Now, technology has a long history of displacing jobs. Paradoxically, it’s also created jobs for people developing these technologies. With AI, we are seeing demand for AI/ML skills increase however, any rise will be offset by rise of low code and no code tools, many powered by AI. AI is an intelligent technology. While dumb(er) technologies required human development, and created more jobs for humans in the knowledge economy, chances are that future AI advances will also be done by AI.
Whether it’s because of socio-economic factors or the intrinsic capabilities of AI, the stage is being set for AI to take over.
In the near future — for sure, AI will have capability and refinement to replace workers, reduce jobs, drastically alter, or eliminate job functions and completely upend the nature of work.
Knowledge Economy
In the Industrial Revolution, we had mechanical machines, physical products and physical skills. As we transitioned to the Information Revolution, machines became more automated, products became more digitized, and physical skills conceded space to knowledge skills.
With the Internet, information, which used to be the preserve of a select gatekeepers (mostly academia and media), became democratized. It was more accessible than ever before. Information systems could also yield amazing amounts of data. The technology revolution of the 80s onwards spurred significant demand for knowledge-work.
The essence of knowledge-work is gathering information, digesting it, and using it to make decision and/or take action.
From analyst to CEO, this is the essence of every job operating in the realm of the knowledge economy.
The hard part in solving a problem is gathering relevant information, figuring out what’s important, and then acting. AI has stand-out capabilities in the first two aspects — and is getting better.
Information Gathering
AI is set to dominate the information gathering space, already providing instant responses to a wide array of subjects. Search, the poster-child of the Information Age, gave us places we could seek to arrive at an answer. AI provides the answer directly. Driven by convenience, answer quality, or peer influence, our reliance on AI for answers will only increase.
The diagnostic and predictive capabilities of AI are boundless in both scope and potential benefits. Smart watches for example can predict certain health conditions well in advanced, based on ML analysis of billions of data points it’s collected.
Decision-making
The decision-space will (still) rely on human judgement. This is because AI is not there yet. Many AI suggestions are unsatisfactory or incorrect even. However, as our acceptance of AI, and dependence on it increases, and as AI gets better, we may eventually make concessions in this space too.
We can expect decisions of low(er) importance, and where actions can be completed digitally, to be delegated to AI — e.g., auto-generating a tailored report to a recipient.
For more involved matters, AI will start to play a bigger role, driven (again) by convenience of the power of defaults. Risk is a factor decision-makers want to control. Humans can sense subtle risks from the environment. While AI cannot replicate that, it offers an equivalent facility — a model trained on 1000s of scenarios than can generate a comprehensive list of commonly observed risks. The quality of human intuition is (semi) offset by the quantity of machine output.
Action
One area where AI cannot venture is physical tasks. It can’t build a house or provide physiotherapy — until such time as autonomous robots are commercially available and socially accepted. AI’s role is expanding in areas where actions can be performed digitally. However, for tasks that require physical work, or matters of the heart, AI remains irrelevant.
Knowledge Work
AI is tailor-made for knowledge work. The prevailing opinion is that AI will obliterate clerical jobs but is unlikely to replace jobs that require creativity, empathy, or complex decision-making skills. The latter part of this theory, while comforting, is misplaced.
Creative fields are already being disrupted. The world we’ve established on information and digital processes is under siege by AI. The influence of AI on digital artistry and content creation is already palpable. Digital replaced paper. AI is replacing digital.
Human touch? Soft aspects are important but only in the context of a corresponding hard aspect. For instance, when an organization introduces a new system, the soft skill of change management becomes vital to facilitate easy adaptation and training. However, if the individuals are already well-informed, the transition may not be as significant, and the need for soft skills may be considerably less.
When the hard aspects become easier or automated, the need for human touch (empathy) will also reduce. The impact of AI, or lack thereof, will depend on what the human touch uniquely solves for.
Complex problems? Well, how do we define complex? Many things are nowhere as complex as they are made out to be. Complexity is often invented, and can even be a related to competence! So, complexity is arguably a subjective term. Software has already streamlined much of the grunt work — research, analysis, and insights — necessary for solving complex problems. AI will elevate this much further.
Chess for instance is a complex game with lots of permutations and strategies. After the arrival of Deep Blue, a milestone in AI evolution, it’s widely acknowledged that a human chess player will never beat a machine again. Elon Musk went as far as saying that the advent of computers has made chess a “simple game”.
The conventional wisdom that AI won’t be able to do softer, creative or complex tasks is misplaced. AI will assume much of the mental labor, particularly tasks involving data, information, and knowledge. With its ability to remember and adapt contextually, it might even evolve into a wellspring of wisdom.
Open AI’s 5 waypoints for AI: conversations, reasoners, agents, innovators and organization, already signal to that future. While AI is still at the first stage, the vision is there, and the capability is arriving fast.
AI will upend large parts of our existence. It will take over the world we have constructed over the past 50 years, a world founded on the information economy and intellectual labor.
Physical work, the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution, which preceded the Information Revolution, remains relatively secure for now.
Ironically, this could lead us back to areas where AI has yet to make inroads — the sphere of physical services and human interaction, of hands and hearts — areas we had largely abandoned in the race for rapid technological progress.
The cloud of AI however, comes with the proverbial silver lining. By taking over knowledge work, AI can liberate us to address the real issues facing the planet — environmental degradation, habitat loss, waste etc., and open the door to real, tactile, and truly meaningful work, that will literally shape our existence.
In a way, knowledge work has run its course. There’s too much information, too much thinking and not enough doing. By taking over knowledge work and bringing us closer to our natural reality, the emergence of AI might be just what we need to save humanity.
