The End of the Knowledge Economy

I ran across a great article from Every that spoke to The End of the Knowledge Economy. Here's an excerpt:

The end of the knowledge economy

We live in a knowledge economy. What you know—and your ability to bring it to bear in any given circumstance—is what creates economic value for you. This was primarily driven by the advent of personal computers and the internet, starting in the 1970s and accelerating through today.

But what happens when that very skill—knowing and utilizing the right knowledge at the right time—becomes something that computers can do faster and sometimes just as well as we can? 

We’ll go from makers to managers, from doing the work to learning how to allocate resources—choosing which work to be done, deciding whether work is good enough, and editing it when it’s not. 

It means a transition from a knowledge economy to an allocation economy. You won’t be judged on how much you know, but instead on how well you can allocate and manage the resources to get work done. 

There’s already a class of people who are engaged in this kind of work every day: managers. But there are only about 1 million managers in the U.S., or about 12% of the workforce. They need to know things like how to evaluate talent, manage without micromanaging, and estimate how long a project will take. Individual contributors—the people in the rest of the economy, who do the actual work—don't need that skill today.

But in this new economy, the allocation economy, they will. Even junior employees will be expected to use AI, which will force them into the role of manager—model manager. Instead of managing humans, they’ll be allocating work to AI models and making sure the work gets done well. They’ll need many of the same skills as human managers of today do (though in slightly modified form). 

I found this argument to be very interesting. The future won't be based on what you can do, but on what you can get done. It's worth all of us brushing up on our managerial skills to ensure we don't get left behind.

The future is here.