The future of knowledge work and productivity

Will we work less in the future?

Image created via Midjourney

My oldest is finishing up their freshman year of high school. Before I know it, we'll be thinking about college or whatever comes next.

It's hard to predict what the future will look like for the workforce, especially with the rise of AI. Will everything change in a few short years, or are we much further away from that? What will work look like for my 7-year-old? Or a newborn baby?

While the mechanics of how work gets done may change, ideas won't. In fact, I think the future of work will rely more on ideas and the humans who come up with them. The most valuable skills will be judgment, creativity, and original thought.

The changing job experience

Earlier this year, 21-year-old Chungin "Roy" Lee was suspended from Columbia University after he created a tool to help software engineers cheat on job interviews. Software engineers often have to go through coding exercises, in real-time, to demonstrate their skills. Lee's tool acts as a screen overlay, undetectable to the interviewer, that allows the interviewee to use ChatGPT or another AI coding tool to get through the interview.

Lee's argument is that job interviews don't mirror real life. Once hired, software engineers are expected to use AI to help with coding. Coding isn't about memorizing a million different lines of syntax: it's about coming up with the idea to solve a problem. The issue is that the interview process hasn't caught up with that reality.

In his manifesto, Lee writes:

Why memorize facts, write code, research anything —
when a model can do it in seconds?

The best communicator, the best analyst, the best problem-solver —
is now the one who knows how to ask the right question.

I'd add that the best job interviewers in the future will also know how to ask the right questions — questions that unpack the person's judgment and creativity, instead of having them regurgitate lines of code. Because people who score highly on technical assessments aren't necessarily the people with the best critical thinking skills.

Education (especially higher education) is facing the same crossroads. If the future isn't about memorization, and AI becomes better at helping students cheat through assignments, what types of exercises and assessments get at the heart of what the student has learned?

Preparing for the idea economy

Several AI researchers released AI 2027, a fictional representation of what they think the world might look like in two years. In AI 2027, the researchers have given the AI agents names, like Agent-2 and Agent-3, and describe how Agent-3 evolves over time. They write:

Agent-3 is not smarter than all humans. But in its area of expertise, machine learning, it is smarter than most, and also works much faster. What Agent-3 does in a day takes humans several days to double-check. Agent-2 supervision helps keep human monitors’ workload manageable, but exacerbates the intellectual disparity between supervisor and supervised.

After months of testing, Agent-3’s strengths and weaknesses grow clearer. It passes honesty tests on well-defined machine learning tasks, because researchers can easily separate honest from dishonest answers in these domains and conduct training accordingly.

On more philosophical issues, it still says what users want to hear, rather than its true assessment of the issue. If you ask its opinion on politics, it will parrot the median position of news sources and educated elites—unless it knows you believe something else, in which case it agrees with you.

Of course, this is pure conjecture. But these well-regarded researchers believe that AI will lack judgment, taste, and opinions — the things that make us human. It can only do what it is trained to do (although the training will continue to improve and replace many tasks we do today).

If we lean into "idea jobs" that rely heavily on critical thinking skills, what does daily work look like? For most knowledge workers, days are likely split between thinking time and mundane (yet necessary) work. Even in my own business of one, some of my time is expended doing admin-type tasks, simply because it's not possible to automate them — yet.

If that were doing similar work for an employer, what happens when those admin-type tasks can be handled by AI? Do I spend all of my day doing knowledge work? Or does the workday completely change?

Work is still tightly tied to the number of hours put in, but maybe the future won't be like that. In the decades since World War II, worker productivity has substantially increased, thanks, in part, to technology. But we don't work less. The 40-hour workweek in the U.S. has been standard since the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1940.

If AI "supercharges" productivity, what happens with that extra time? Does pay increase to reflect more contributions of higher-value work? Do we work less?

Former Secretary of State Pete Buttigieg pondered a future dominated by AI, saying:

We could figure out a way to deal more of the American people into the enormous value that's being created here, in a way that means that for most Americans, this means more economic security. Means less work, more money in your pocket.

And then we work on the other big issue, which is what do you do with your time? Which Americans have really struggled with. What if we actually had more time to do things [like] focusing on family and neighborhood and faith, community, whatever matters in your life. We can set ourselves up for that, or we could screw it up and get into a really dark place.

Technology skills for the next generation

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