the knowledge era
I keep seeing more and more people talk about how ai is going to take our jobs, how fundamentally it has shifted knowledge work from something low-level and hurdle-bound to something on a key-press.
While I agree that access to information has become cheap, people have been more overwhelmed than ever. if, as a society we go and reach a point where everyone mostly relies on ai-or-whatever knowledge tool is the best, one big worry people have is that it erodes our way to understand and command control of what we know.
I think while that's partly true, it does two things.
One, it frees us a lot of time to do other things. especially time to think. Like this might sound funny, but people, so much of our pivotal innovations have come while thinking, people have had uninterrupted periods in their life where they were left pondering, researching, digging on what makes them alive, and what they feel about the world. A large part of our discoveries as mankind come through by providing the humans time and space. now, you might say, post world war boom accelerated this time to think and still yielded results.
Two, it forces us to rethink what we value in our creative process. What exactly makes us skilled at a task. Why do we value the work we do. Is it something innately interesting to us? Is the challenge more interesting? Is it something else?