michael-dean-k/

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.

Universal basic income is a basic phrase. It’s only one of several approaches to reattribute wealth after our social contract nullifies.

One alternate idea is universal basic compute (UBC), which is about giving everyone free access to the most powerful AI models. Sam Altman recently said that UBI might not work, and we should try UBC instead. This is even more unlikely to work. Giving someone Claude Mythos, the killer model, doesn’t mean they can turn prompts into dinner. Access doesn’t guarantee results. It faces similar odds as entrepeneurship. But maybe it has enough agency so all you have to do is write “make me $10,000 this week”—in that case, everyone will run it, and then it’ something like a lottery, where some machines happen to beat other machines.

The more likely route is universal basic services (UBS), where a government or company provides you, for free, all the things you used to need money for: healthcare, education, housing, transportation, food. The engineering elite will harness their superintelligence to achieve such radical efficiencies that the cost of everything will crater. Maybe it's cheap enough to become a trivial expense. This is a nice idea, one where I can imagine myself focused completely on my art, with no need to slave away for a wage anymore. It’s also science fiction. I don’t doubt that this can happen in 20 or 30 years, but labor shock is coming a lot faster (in less than 5), meaning there will be a transition generation of turbulence.

Then there’s universal basic dividends (UBD) and universal basic equity (UBE), in which citizens get shares of collectively-owned assets, like shares in a frontier AI lab or robotics company. OpenAI was originally set up for something like this, until it weaseled out of it’s non-profit entity.

All of these have the same critical flaw, the U. Whether it’s a government or company, you can’t meaningfully redistribute to 7 billion people without destroying the parent entity. Instead, we may be looking down the barrel of a new definition of labor, less focused on productive output, and unfortunately, more so on data and attention, what a citizen truly has to offer in the eyes of a state. We'll find something to exchange for the money and services to flow down, but it won’t be unconditional. I suppose a contract, by definition, is never unconditional, and so neither should a social contract.

In addition to building a "classical" syllabus that I read, I figure my audio diet should be of a different nature, one that's as modern as possible. I'm going with the Moonshots podcast, with Peter Diamandis. This group of guys are probably more anchored in the future than anyone else I've found. It feels adjacent to the All In podcast format, but less business-focused, and more centered on futurism. There is a certainty among them that we are in the singularity, accelerating to a techno-optimist future, which is antithetical to the Neo-Romantic essayists (it is rare to find an essayist who is both a humanist and a technologist).

I do have to be skeptical of their worldview, however, for they are schmoozing among the elites building this stuff, and so they're likely to have a rosy-eyed view on how this might all fare well for millionaires, without realistically focusing on or caring about how it effects the daily lives. They do seem to harbor a certain fetishism about technology and progress, and a boyish fascination with going to space and uploading our consciousness, for maybe the simple fact that it's a science fiction dream beyond our current life. There's a Faustian sin in summoning the future for future's sake.

They also very openly want to live enough to live forever; if they can survive another 15-years, they are rich enough to have access to anti-aging technology. The whole premise of technologically cheating death is also a philosophy that feels disconnected from our history. But I wonder if you could make the claim that Montaigne didn't have the luxury of philosophizing about life extension. If we make shape our philosophies to justify our situation, then is our whole canon on "the importance of dying" only stemming from pains and fears of a low-tech society? I guess, intuitively, from a child's perspective, the idea of not wanting to die is a natural one, and to embrace it is the wisdom of an adult, but I suppose we're nearing a flood of new cultural debates stemming from a new reality where the immortality choice isn't theoretical, but real, which changes the whole calculus.

So the point of listening to a group like this that is openly "transhumanist" is to model the future, hear them out, but then take it one step further, and truly consider the moral and ethical implications of where all this is heading.

Revolutionary tax proposal #1: anything above $100m/year is taxed at 90%, but in exchange for political equity in the country (ie: delegation and voting). It formalizes lobbying and makes it transparent. To prevent the rich from steering the country too hard in their favor, there can be provisions where legislators, citizens, and oligarchs have checks and balances. Ie: to put it kidishly simple, each can have a 33% stake in directing that taxation. Another way to think of it is forced investment in pre-approved pro-American funds, companies, etc.

TBF: I have little sense of what I'm talking about in these matters. But the general context behind this is that power dynamics organically took control of the country and defied the spirit of the founding architecture. I assume there are many examples on how the Constitution and it's amendments dit not protect the original vision. And so the principal is to understand how power actually moves and work with it; don't kill it or shun it, but formalize it into legal structures, make it transparent, and then force it to comply with specific standards that muzzle and channel it's wolf power.

Anti-AI sentiment is escalating: the Pause AI movement, state-level data center bans, molotov cocktails at Sam Altman's house, artists going to dumb phones, witch hunts for AI prose. Protesting and boycotting AI, at a personal level, is the exact wrong approach. It misunderstands the Luddites. They were not against the machines in principle, they were against the factory owners not sharing the profits of the factory. This is possibly about to play out a grand scale: AI and robotics labs could capture nearly all economic value, and there will be a plea to nationalize these companies and redistribute the profits.

While the scope and effects here are way bigger, the workers of the Industrial Revolution were far more disempowered. You couldn't "just do things." You could operate someone else's machine, but you couldn't just spin up a competing factory; that required land, resources, labor, none of which you had. There was just a certain amount of capital needed to compete, and it wasn't possible. Workers were limited to being workers, so they had no choice but to revolt with violence.

The difference today is that the worker and artist suddenly have access to build-your-own-factory tooling. A single person for $100/month can compete with companies valued in the millions and billions. It's asymmetric labor. Regular people can build civilization scale infrastructure, distribution labels, social media engines, software, etc. Never before has there been a democratic opportunity for people to self-organize into their own collectives, tribes, governments, and whatnot.

At least to me, this kind of optimism—principled, delirious, ambitious, but still careful and skeptical—is better than the cynicism of the "resist" factions. There is nothing you or your circles gain by putting your head in the sand; it brings a distanced, crabby, virtue-signaled posture that does nothing to change the actual situation. You gain nothing by staying on the ChatGPT free plan on default settings and complaining no how it's an ineffective, incapable, sycophant. It requires an ounce of nuance, to be critical of how the labs act, but to then use that lab's best tools towards your own sovereignty and vision.

I think what I'm trying to get at here is that the Luddites of the 21st-century will not be reverting back to typewriters and flip phones, they will be wielding AI tools in ways to foster human connection, and the kind of pro-human cultural that the Internet originally promised, but was never realized under capitalism.

When we say we "distrust institutions," we're pointing at the wrong thing; it's the institutes that are withering. We use these words interchangeably, but I think the separation clarifies.

An "institution" is an abstract, permanent, inter-generational primitive—like education, marriage, the free press, the essay—while an "institute" is a concrete embodiment that serves it. Think of an institution as a societal organ. Think of institutes as the specialized tissue that keep the organ functioning and regenerating.

As generations turn, new sets of people are handed down the great responsibility to protect and evolve institutes through the storms of time and technology. Without upgrading our institutes, society goes through slow-motion organ failure, with phantom pains and spiritual malaise that can't be traced back to the source. Schools still look like schools, but everyone is cheating through a Homework Apocalypse, and suddenly we have all sorts of cultural cancers that seem inevitable. Institutes are the civic building blocks of a sane society, and yet we glorify unicorns who create "value" but feel no responsibility for their dying elders.

Institutes operate through the inverse of market logic. Where startups are designed to accrue all of the upside, an institute is sacrificial, designed so society gets the upside, even at its own peril. Of course they swim in the same water, but institutes swim differently: they have opposite answers to questions on how to steer, what to make, where to focus, who to include, and when to stop. An attempt at some principles:

• mission-driven, not market-driven;
• timeless contributions, not self-serving content;
• involved in ecosystem building, not niche extraction;
• active members, not passive users;
• century-long legacy, not liquidity through an exit.

Usually an institute comes from patronage: you can’t resist market currents unless you’re supported by endowments, donations, foundations, tuitions, grants, and such things. You can’t start an institute in your garage, but now with AI and the collapse of cost, I suppose you could try. So many of the one-person AI company fantasies are about a single founder reaching a billion-dollar valuation, which is the cheapest form of ambition there is; the better question is around the scale and spirit of cultural impact achievable by a one-person micro-institute.

I got charged $4,500 for a band-aid.

For that price I could’ve bought 90,000 band-aids on Amazon (two for each person in my NYC neighborhood), but emergency room band-aids must be of a different substance.

A month ago we cut my newborn daughter’s finger with a nail clipper and it wouldn't stop bleeding for an hour. The on-call pediatrician—who was naturally grumpy since it was after midnight—insisted we go to the ER, and after 5 hours in the waiting room, the bleeding stopped right before we were called in. After one minute with the doctor and five with the nurse (most of it small talk about islands in Greece), we left with a band-aid on a dry scab. I assumed it would be an expensive lesson, a few hundred dollars to breathe hospital air, but we were charged a whole family’s round-trip tickets to Athens.

What's weirder than American private healthcare is how used to it everyone is. A family member said, “well, it was March, so you didn’t hit your deductible yet.” I’m willing to pay the $577 for the emotional labor of fixing a boo boo, but the remaining mystery, the $3,923 on yesterday’s mail bill, feels beyond reason. I’ll be requesting an itemized breakdown to call their bluff, and if they don’t bring it down to a normal but still ridiculous level ($500 for a band-aid—10,000x above market price) I will evade the debt collectors until they tank my credit and jail me.

I have been brewing on this Call for New Aesthetics. I’m stuck on the question of why we need a new aesthetic for the 21st century. To go one layer deeper, what role does an aesthetic actually achieve? Like let’s say you can trace the lineage from the iPhone’s design back to Bauhaus. If the Bauhaus never existed, and smartphones took on a different aesthetic, say one that is more ornate, would we not still have TikTok? I guess this all ties back to my conclusion at the end of architecture school, that probably played some role in leaving the industry: it is capital that controls everything, and as revolutionary as architecture aspires to be, it is something like frivolous dressing atop capital aspirations (picked this up from Manfredo Tafuri, a Marxist critic of architecture; IANA Marxist, but the critique is hard to forget). No matter how you design a bank, a bank is a bank. Bauhaus was not a revolutionary aesthetic movement, but a response to the economic reality of mass production (could be an oversimplification, but I think it's accurate to see it as a response, as most architecture is). There is a long history of architects trying to proactively change culture, but failing because they don't actually have leverage. And so what you really need is not just an aesthetic or formal style, but a reimagining of the programs, institutions, and rituals of society, and then a way to use form/ornament to realize those ambitious visions. Put another way, architecture can’t matter without the vision and power of a client, and I don’t think there’s a future for architecture within the OS of capitalism—but if capitalism is about to implode, maybe there’s a new opportunity.

Silicon Valley has cannibalized The Fountainhead and inverted its meaning. They celebrate Roark-like rhetoric—innovation, disruption, individual genius—but then go on to act like Keating: obsessed with markets, perception, appeasement, hype, status, and conformity. To be Roark is to fundamentally not care what the market thinks or wants, which goes directly against the main ethos of “build things people want.”

Roark had an unshakeable ethical core, a vision for the world that the world didn’t want, yet. He was willing to endure hardship, poverty, and hate, but didn’t despair over it; he had patience, faith in his destiny, and saw no other point than to follow his dream even if all signs pointed to it being a dead end. He stuck to his vision long enough for it to manifest in the world, and eventually others saw the transcendent beauty in it (Roark is modeled off of Frank Lloyd Wright). Roark was a force of nature, understood by no one in his life time, but everyone afterward.

In contrast, Keating is a status-chaser that plays social games. He is practical, while Roark is extremely unreasonable.

The point of Fountainhead, to me, is that Roark tolerated pain without suffering for his virtues, making him far more like a Christ-like character than a capitalist. There is no doubt, anxiety, despair, spiraling. He accepts all pain and does what he needs to; it’s the reader that experiences the pain and questions his almost inhuman reactions.