An Obituary for The Knowledge Worker – 1966 to 2022?

Does AI pose an existential threat to the knowledge worker?

The term ‘Knowledge Worker’ was coined by management theorist Peter Druker, in The Effective Executive, as far back as 1966. However, he introduced the concept of ‘Knowledge Work’ a few years earlier in this book, The Landmarks of Tomorrow. And while ‘Knowledge Work’ has been difficult to define over the years, in trying to categorize it we rely on the adage that ‘we know it when we see it’.

In 1996 the OECD made the claim that “although the pace may differ, all [developed] economies are moving towards a knowledge based economy”, by which we mean a system of consumption and production that is based on intellectual capital and where a significant component of value may consist of intangible assets such as the value of its workers' knowledge or intellectual property. At the end of the twentieth century, Druker observed that "the most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity."  He hadn’t foreseen the rise of artificial intelligence and its likely impact on ‘knowledge work’ and the ‘knowledge worker’.

So, who are these knowledge workers? Definitions are many and varied, but we will say that they are individuals who allocate knowledge to productive use, maybe they have specialized knowledge on a specific topic, or have the ability to find or access new information and then the capability to analyze and utilize that information to generate actionable knowledge. They are performing roles in the knowledge economy including anticipatory imagination, problem solving, problem seeking, and generating ideas and aesthetic sensibilities (Loo, 2017). From market research to copywriting, from advertising to management consulting, from software development to the law, from accounting to architecture.

Are we being overly pessimistic to say that AI has killed off the knowledge worker? Maybe a little. But then again, maybe not. There will no doubt be some knowledge work roles collaborating with AI in this sphere BUT we think that those cohorts of knowledge workers who believe that what they do is too ‘special’ to be affected (and we have heard this from a lot of lawyers recently), we respectfully suggest that you may be suffering from optimism bias … dismissing today’s AI as little threat tomorrow. AI’s development will exhibit discontinuous change … its evolution will not be slow and steady.

Here we wanted to share a few recent examples that speak the threat that the knowledge worker is facing. Is it existential? You can be the judge …

The impact on software engineers … At an AI summit hosted by Arizona State University, CEO of Turnitin LLC (an Internet-based similarity detection service used by Academia), Chris Caren observed that "Most of our employees are [software] engineers, we have a few hundred of them, and I think that in 18 months we will need only 20% of that number and we will be able to hire them directly out of high school rather than from 4-year college [programs] … and probably the same for a lot of sales and marketing functions. I see very fast change.”

The impact on copywriters … Adweek reported that one marketing agency pitted Open-AI-powered copywriting software against a team of copywriters to write digital content for clients. The AI system, paired with a human editor, was “magnitudes more efficient”. There was an 87% reduction in production time.  In another story, one copywriter (Henry Williams) observed “my amusement turned to horror: it took ChatGPT 30 seconds to create, for free, an article that would take me hours to write. The result was impressive. Sure, the tone was inhuman and the structure as sophisticated as a college essay, but the key points, the grammar and the syntax were all spot on”. So yes, there will still be a need for copywriters as editors but to Chris Caren’s point above … businesses may need far fewer.

The impact on legal associates and paralegals … Fairfax Insights review on the impact of AI on the legal profession concludes that “To the extent that more of the routine work, often handled by associates and paralegals, is replaced by AI, there will be an impact on the number of associates and paralegals required […] even if lawyers are still needed to review the output, AI will put a premium on “skilled technology staff” who can get the best out of the tech”. Who would start a job as a paralegal today hoping for a long and satisfying career?

The impact on advertising production teams … Here is an eye-opening description of AIs ability to reduce “friction” and hence cost in advertising – provided by Giuseppe Stigliano, CEO, Spring Studios during a London Business School panel discussion. He was talking about the gestation of an advert. “Moving from the initial creative to actually filming the ad … you have talent agencies to deal with, actors to book, locations to scout and arrange (and a back-up in case something goes wrong). You have travel, accommodation and restaurants to book. And people to handle all these logistics. You have the process of filming and then post-production.  But AI offers you an opportunity to create the same ad from your laptop – actors and locations are generated by AI. You need none of the expensive logistics. You have none of the friction and hence the cost of actually having to deal with people”. YOU create friction in the system. People = friction = cost!

What all these examples allude to is the reduction, perhaps the startling reduction, in headcount that we will see, the substitution of labor for capital and the changing skillset and experience level of whatever labor is required. Will AI lead to the death of the knowledge worker … not completely, but it may be far closer to evisceration than any of us are going to feel comfortable about.