AI, Knowledge Work, and Magnificent Humans

Last week, college commencement ceremonies were disrupted by the shouts and heckling of angry students. Graduations are typically bland rituals of encouragement and optimism. Not this time. Across the country, graduating seniors booed their speakers when their talks turned to artificial intelligence and the future of work. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was jeered at the University of Arizona when he brought up the subject. He seemed genuinely surprised by the reaction. Speakers at other schools handled the response with even less grace. Sitting in those crowds were students who had spent their entire lives believing that cognitive excellence was the safest path to security and success.

Then, just as they were arriving at the threshold of professional life, society began to rethink how much of that cognitive labor could be replaced by machines.

For decades, ambitious people have been told that education was the best investment you could make in yourself. Study hard. Become an expert. Learn to think critically, and you’ll succeed in this world. That bargain shaped entire lives. It shaped who got into elite schools, who rose inside organizations, and who came to see themselves as valuable. For many of us, the recent advances in AI feel like a betrayal of that bargain.

And then the Vatican spoke. In his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV chose to focus on the dangers of AI. And while Magnifica humanitas warned of the dangers of job displacement and environmental consequences, the Pontiff seemed focused on an even greater danger. A culture organized around frictionless cognition eventually changes the people living inside it. Their introspection weakens. Their attention fragments. Long before machines might ever become fully intelligent, humans risk becoming less contemplative, less compassionate, and less capable of independent thought. Little by little, we abandon the divine gifts of our humanity.

And so, in our topsy-turvy times, one of our most future-focused leaders may be the leader of one of civilization’s most ancient institutions.

The rest of us seem to be reacting to AI in a predictably short-term way. AI is framed as an inevitability, and adaptation feels like an ultimatum. Companies are telling employees to learn the tools. Develop better prompting skills. Increase your productivity. Or else.

That advice isn’t entirely wrong, but we’d do well to consider the Pope’s admonition. In the years ahead, the most valuable people may not be the ones who become the best at working with machines. They may be the ones who become better at doing the things machines struggle to replicate. And that’s where things get really tough. Because the kinds of thinking that AI can’t do are the kinds of thinking that many humans have already forgotten how to do. But maybe not all of us. And maybe not irrevocably.

The Myth of the Knowledge Worker

AI futurist and former OpenAI exec Zack Kass recently made a provocative argument: AI is commoditizing intelligence. For decades, companies competed on talent. They hired people who could quickly absorb a lot of information and turn it into clear insights and action. Entire industries built their identities around the belief that cognitive horsepower was scarce. Consulting firms, law firms, investment banks, pharmaceutical companies, technology companies, and elite universities all treated intelligence as a primary source of status and competitive advantage. Now, that advantage seems to be going away. AI can instantly perform many cognitive functions at a near-zero marginal cost. In a world where intelligence is available on tap, analytical horsepower isn’t a differentiator. 

Perhaps that’s because the new technology has gotten so good. Or perhaps it’s because our talents aren’t what they’re claimed to be. To understand why workers are being replaced, we need to take a closer look at the kinds of workers our institutions have been trying to produce for decades.

For years, critics and reformers have observed that our model of public education was developed to make children better workers in an industrial economy. We teach kids how to show up on time, stand in line, and follow directions. In doing so, they learn how to become productive members of the working class.

After World War II, industrialized countries began to evolve these systems. They invested heavily in science and math education. Learning plans emphasized cognitive recall and critical thinking. Later, we introduced concepts like team collaboration and social-emotional learning. Schools helped young people to become better writers, solve math problems, and understand scientific ideas. In doing so, they learned the skills needed to go to meetings, make PowerPoints, and fill out TPS reports in triplicate. 

The problem is that they rarely learned creativity, empathy, or independent thought. In his book, Excellent Sheep, former Yale lecturer William Deresiewicz argues that elite institutions have become extraordinarily effective at producing capable people who know how to optimize systems without necessarily developing unique ideas. Students learn how to perform intelligence. They learn how to succeed. But few develop the ability to stand apart from the system itself and ask deeper questions about meaning, purpose, judgment, or conviction.

We wanted to create knowledge workers, but we ended up creating information workers.

Our system is optimized to pump out productive members of the managerial class: administrators, bankers, lawyers, and coders. And that’s the kind of work that AI is coming for. Because AI automates information work, not knowledge work.

Actual knowledge work requires capacities that educational systems struggle to cultivate at scale. Those who could demonstrate independent thinking were often seen as outliers. Some were gadflies within the system like Richard Feynman. Others walked away from that system altogether. Walt Disney, Richard Branson, and John Lennon were all high school dropouts. Thomas Edison was largely homeschooled. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made it to college but left before they could graduate. For them, knowledge work looked entirely different.

The Call of Deep Work

Real knowledge work looks like what Cal Newport calls deep work. Newport defines deep work as the ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks for extended periods of time. He argues that this kind of attention is what allows people to produce original insights, solve genuinely hard problems, and develop rare forms of expertise. Deep work asks people to stay with difficult questions long enough for something original to emerge instead of reacting to the first idea. It requires patience with ambiguity. This is the kind of thinking that AI struggles with.

Unfortunately, modern work culture has systematically eroded our capacity for knowledge work. Long before AI arrived, organizations had already trained people away from the very forms of cognition that may now become most valuable. We’ve rewarded people who thrive in an environment of endless meetings, Slack notifications, and accelerated decision cycles. Companies reward visible activity far more consistently than sustained thought. And AI only intensifies that pressure.

And that’s the great irony of our time. At the very moment when we need the ability to create new knowledge, many of us are simply out of practice. We’ve lost those critical thinking habits, and we need to get them back.

What We Do Next

For centuries, Western painters labored to achieve one goal: the accurate representation of reality. Then photography arrived and did in seconds what even the greatest artists once spent years mastering. But instead of killing painting, the camera liberated it. Once painters no longer had to compete with mechanical representation, they began exploring things that were far more human. Impressionism, expressionism, surrealism, and modern art emerged not despite photography, but because of it. The machine became better at reproducing reality, so humans turned toward interpretation instead.

To be sure, not every small-town portrait painter ended up with a showing at the Paris Exhibition. Many found themselves displaced. And many will this time. Still, the shift in painting offers a reasonable path forward for how we might reclaim our role in knowledge work. As the machines become better, humans may move toward forms of thinking rooted less in computation and more in interpretation. And there are small ways we can start rewiring our brains.

1. Pick up a book.

It’s time to learn how to focus again. That starts with relearning how to read. Many of us haven’t read a nonfiction book in years. And, no, audiobooks don’t count. Pick a difficult book. Underline it. Highlight passages. Scribble in the margins. Argue with the author. A good book isn’t content to be consumed. It’s a conversation to join.

2. Keep a journal.

History’s great creators kept notebooks. Walt Disney. Charles Darwin. Virginia Woolf. They understood something that many of us have forgotten: original ideas rarely arrive fully formed. Most begin as fragments. A question. An observation. A pattern that doesn’t quite make sense yet. A journal isn’t a record of what happened. It’s a workshop for thinking.

3. Take notes.

On your next Zoom call, leave your camera on. Don’t multitask. Don’t answer email. Turn off your AI notetaker and start writing notes yourself by hand. If you’re outsourcing the act of paying attention, you’re outsourcing the act of thinking. The most valuable part of a meeting isn’t the information you hear. It’s the connections you make in your mind.

4. Try to meditate.

Meditation isn’t just about relaxation. It’s about attention. It teaches you to notice your thoughts instead of being carried away by them. And meditation isn’t the same thing as prayer or daydreaming. Meditation cultivates awareness. Prayer creates connection to a power greater than ourselves. Daydreaming fosters imagination. Do your brain a favor and make time for all three.

5. Take a walk.

Many of history’s greatest thinkers were walkers. Friedrich Nietzsche walked for miles through the Alps. Beethoven carried a notebook on his daily walks through Vienna. Steve Jobs was famous for walking meetings. Leave your phone behind. Skip the podcast. Walk without a destination. Walk without a purpose. The goal isn’t exercise. It’s thought. Walking creates a rare condition in modern life: a mind that is simultaneously focused and free to wander.

A Cause for Optimism

All of this suggests that the next phase of the AI era might not simply reorganize work. It might reorganize status. For decades, organizations rewarded people who demonstrated speed and visible productivity. The ideal employee became someone who could absorb enormous amounts of information while remaining always available. Those traits are the kinds of behaviors that intelligent systems are capable of replicating. We’ll need people who think more deeply than quickly.

The future belongs to those who create knowledge, not just manage information. That should give us reason for optimism. The qualities that matter most in the years ahead aren’t new. They’re ancient human capacities that have been waiting to be rediscovered. It’s what makes us magnificently human.