Knowledge workers are middleware
Something about the term “knowledge worker” doesn’t settle with me. Some people identify as one, and I’m sure they either grieve of mock the idea that AI will kill email jobs, but knowledge work is the work we should be most eager to shed.
Compared to a factory worker, one who manipulates physical materials and turns them into goods, a knowledge worker does the same with information. It’s computer work. There is a utilitarian air to the phrase, an efficiency. It serves the needs of an employer. It’s about sifting through and repackaging information to create economic value. A better term might be “information assemblers.” An information assembler can go their whole life within a particular domain of specialization and build a strong intuition for how it works, but without knowing Knowledge.
There are many ironies in the phrase. The knowledge worker is so busy setting up meetings and writing reports and filling out reviews and dealing with clients and managing products, that they never have time to touch Knowledge, the thing that matters. It’s an oxymoron. One cannot work and simultaneously gain Knowledge. It’s antithetical to technique, to markets, to legible value. Knowledge is beyond an industry, beyond a process, beyond specialization itself. Knowledge is generalizable insight: how to think or design, when to start over, who to draw from, what’s even worth pursuing, why do anything? It's an inner knowing, a model of the world, and a process for thinking. Virtues, metaphysics, epistemology—I guess I'm describing philosophy.
Knowledge can obviously help a worker be more efficient, but (1) it’s extremely slow and time-consuming to obtain, requiring study far outside of your practical workflows, and so it’s impossible to justify on the clock, and (2) once you obtain Knowledge, you care far less about efficiency because you’re questioned the whole machine. It’s not a surprise this term was coined in 1959 by Peter Drucker, the founder of management theory. I don’t know much about him or his book (The Landmarks of Tomorrow), but I imagine a midcentury worker being honored and proud to operate in the celestial fields of “knowledge.”
The reason I wrote this post is because knowledge workers are being told they need to master AI tools, when it’s precisely those same AI tools that will end information assembly jobs. I suppose there is a transition period where, while the tools are still maturing, you can 2x your efficiency and do fine. But if your job can be broken into a series of machine-legible steps, and all the context needed is documented, then even if you 10x your efficiency, are you not just expensive and now redundant middleware between you and the output your manager wants?
Middleware is part of a software stack that helps two disconnected systems talk to one another. It translates, transforms, and routes. It doesn’t produce anything original, it reformats inputs to outputs, like a knowledge worker. In the last decade, we’ve already seen middleware become automated and commoditized. Instead of custom integrations, companies now build APIs so they can directly call from each other's databases. Marketplaces like Zapier let people string together API calls through a no-code interface. If this trend continues, jobs will become zaps too.
The better move to prep for AI is to dip into humanism, design, philosophy, psychology, intellectualism—things completely outside the paradigm of technique, efficiency, and capitalism. For one, they’re fun and soul-enriching, but also they cultivate a mind more that’s more competitive across labor games. To someone in the knowledge work economy, this seems too impractical to take seriously, but specialization is a losing game. Instead, you should figure out how to give yourself a liberal art education. It’s free if you have internet. Learn to think, doubt, model, and visualize; how you rotate a problem in your own head will define how you use AI.