Competitiveness in the AI era is deep work.
Google Gemini by Jump Associates
Last week, a university graduation ceremony was interrupted by angry students shouting and jeering. Graduation ceremonies are usually bland rituals of encouragement and optimism. Not this time. Across the country, speakers booed when graduating seniors talked about artificial intelligence and the future of work. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt Heckled at the University of Arizona when he brought up the topic. He seemed genuinely surprised by the reaction. Speakers from other schools responded to this response: even less grace. Sitting in that crowd were students who had spent their lives believing that superior cognitive abilities were the safest path to safety and success.
And just when they were about to reach the threshold of professional life, society began to reconsider how much of its cognitive labor could be replaced by machines. For decades, ambitious people have been told that education is the best investment they can make in themselves. Please study hard. Become an expert. If you learn to think critically, you will succeed in this world. That transaction shaped my entire life. It shaped who got into elite schools, who was promoted within organizations, and who came to consider themselves worthy. For many of us, recent advances in AI feel like a betrayal of that deal.
And then the Vatican spoke. Pope Leo XIV, in his first encyclical, I decided to focus on the dangers of AI.. and in between Magnifica Humanitas The pope had warned of the dangers of job losses and environmental impact, but appeared to be focusing on an even bigger danger. A culture organized around frictionless cognition ultimately changes the people who live within it. Their introspection weakens. Their attention becomes fragmented. Long before machines become fully intelligent, humans are at risk of becoming less contemplative, less considerate, and less capable of independent thought. Little by little we give up our divine gifts as human beings.
Therefore, in these fast-paced times, some of the most forward-looking leaders may be the leaders of civilization’s oldest institutions.
The rest of us seem to be responding to AI in predictable short-term ways. AI is seen as an inevitability, and adaptation feels like an ultimatum. Companies are telling their employees to learn the tools. Develop better prompting skills. Improve your productivity. or.
While that advice is not completely wrong, it is good to consider the Pope’s recommendations. In the coming years, the most valuable people may not be the ones who are best at working with machines. They may be people who can do things better that machines have difficulty replicating. And from there, things get really tough. Because the kind of thinking that AI cannot do is the kind of thinking that many humans have already forgotten how to do. But maybe not all of us. And it’s probably not irreversible.
The myth of the knowledge worker
AI futurist and Zach Kass, former OpenAI executive I recently made a provocative argument that AI is commoditizing intelligence. For decades, companies have been competing for talent. They hired people who could quickly absorb lots of information and turn it into clear insights and actions. Entire industries have constructed an identity based on the belief that cognitive abilities are lacking. Consulting firms, law firms, investment banks, pharmaceutical companies, technology companies, and elite universities all treated intelligence as a major source of status and competitive advantage. Now, that advantage appears to be disappearing. AI can perform many cognitive functions instantly with near-zero marginal cost. In a world where intelligence is readily available, analytical capabilities are no longer a differentiator.
Perhaps that’s because the new technology is so good. Or maybe it’s because our talents are not what they claim 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 public education model was developed to make children better workers in the industrial economy. We teach children how to arrive 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, developed countries began evolving these systems. They invested heavily in science and mathematics education. The learning plan emphasized cognitive recall and critical thinking. Later, we introduced concepts such as team collaboration and social-emotional learning. Schools helped young people become better writers, solve math problems, and understand scientific thinking. In doing so, they learned the skills necessary to attend meetings, create PowerPoints, and complete TPS reports three times.
The problem is that they learn little creativity, empathy, and independent thinking. In his book excellent sheep, William Deresiewicz, a former Yale lecturer, argues that elite educational institutions have become highly effective at producing talented people who know how to optimize systems without necessarily developing original ideas. Students learn how to perform intelligence. They learn how to be successful. But few people develop the ability to step back from the system itself and ask deeper questions about meaning, purpose, judgment, and beliefs.
We wanted to create knowledge workers, but in the end, information laborer.
Our systems are optimized to increase the productivity of management classes such as administrators, bankers, lawyers, and programmers. And that’s exactly what AI wants to do. This is because AI automates information work, not knowledge work.
Real knowledge work requires competencies that education systems struggle to foster at scale. People who can demonstrate independent thinking are often considered outliers. There were also in-system horseflies like Richard Feynman. Others have left the system entirely. Walt Disney, Richard Branson, and John Lennon were all high school dropouts. Thomas Edison was primarily educated at home. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates went to college but dropped out before graduating. For them, knowledge work looked completely different.
A call to deep work
What does real knowledge work look like? Call Newport California deep work. Newport defines deep work as the ability to concentrate for long periods of time without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks. This kind of attentiveness, he argues, allows people to generate unique insights, solve truly difficult problems, and develop rare forms of expertise. Deep work requires you to linger on difficult questions long enough to come up with something original, rather than reacting to the first idea. Ambiguity requires patience. This is a concept that AI is not good at.
Unfortunately, modern work culture is systematically eroding our knowledge work capabilities. Long before AI, organizations were already training people to move away from the very forms of cognition that may currently be most valuable. We’ve rewarded people who thrive in an environment of endless meetings, Slack notifications, and accelerated decision-making cycles. Companies reward visible activity much more consistently than sustained thinking. And AI will only intensify that pressure.
And that’s the great irony of our time. At the moment when we need the ability to create new knowledge, many of us are simply not practicing it. We have lost the habit of critical thinking and need to get it back.
what to do next
For centuries, Western painters have strived to achieve one goal: to accurately represent reality. Then came photography, achieving in seconds what once took even great artists years to master. But instead of killing painting, the camera liberated it. When painters no longer had to compete with mechanical expression, they began to explore something more human. Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and modern art were born because of photography, not in spite of it. As machines have become better at reproducing reality, humans are now doing the interpretation instead.
To be sure, not all small-town portrait painters ended up exhibiting at the Paris Exposition. Many found themselves displaced. And this time too, many people will do the same. Still, the transformation of painting offers a rational path forward for how to reclaim our role in knowledge work. As machines become better, humans may move toward forms of thought that are more rooted in interpretation than calculation. And there are small ways to start rewiring your brain.
1. Pick up a book.
It’s time to learn how to refocus. It starts with relearning how to read. Many of us haven’t read a nonfiction book in years. And no, audiobooks don’t count. Choose a difficult book. Underline. Highlight the passage. I doodle in the margins. Discuss with the author. A good book is not content to be consumed. This is a conversation to participate in.
2. Keep a diary.
The great creators of history kept notebooks. Walt Disney. Charles Darwin. Virginia Woolf. They understood something that many of us forget. That’s because original ideas rarely arrive fully formed. Most start as fragments. I have a question. It’s an observation. A pattern I don’t quite understand yet. A diary is not a record of what happened. This is a thinking workshop.
3. Take notes.
Keep your camera on for your next Zoom call. Don’t multitask. Please do not reply to emails. Turn off the AI note-taker and start writing notes by hand. If you’re outsourcing the act of paying attention, you’re also outsourcing the act of thinking. The most valuable part of a meeting is not the information you hear. It’s the connection you make in your head.
4. Try meditating.
Meditation is more than just relaxation. It’s about attention. It teaches you to be aware of your thoughts instead of being carried away by them. And meditation is not the same as prayer or daydreaming. Meditation cultivates consciousness. Prayer creates a connection to a power greater than ourselves. Daydreaming fosters imagination. Be smart and make time to work on all three.
5. Let’s take a walk.
Many of history’s greatest thinkers were walkers. Friedrich Nietzsche walked many miles through the Alps. Beethoven carried a notebook with him on his daily walks through Vienna. Steve Jobs was famous for his walking meetings. Leave your cell phone behind. Skip the podcast. Walk without a destination. Walk aimlessly. The goal is not to exercise. It is thought. Walking creates a state that is rare in modern life: the mind is both focused and free to roam at the same time.
Reasons for optimism
All of this suggests that the next phase of the AI era may be about more than simply reorganizing work. Possibility to reorganize status. For decades, organizations have rewarded people who demonstrate speed and measurable productivity. The ideal employee has become someone who can absorb vast amounts of information while staying informed. These characteristics are the kinds of behaviors that intelligent systems can replicate. You’ll need people who think deeper, not faster.
The future belongs to those who not only manage information, but also create knowledge. That should give us reason for optimism. The qualities that will be most important in the coming years are not new. These are ancient human abilities waiting to be rediscovered. That’s what makes us great people.
