Adam Riley and I have been discussing this piece for weeks, and I think the discussion has been instructive.
Adam’s instinct, drawn from the consultants in his study, is that the most important shift is psychological — the discomfort, the renegotiation of professional worth, the lived experience of working with a tool that is both useful and unsettling.
My instinct, with my academic hat on, is that the most important shift is structural. Knowledge work has long been organised around a particular division of labour: juniors do the analytic graft, seniors carry the judgement. The pyramid produces both the output and the expertise. AI doesn’t disturb this gently. It dissolves the bottom of the pyramid faster than the top can adapt.
Both readings end in the same place, which is why the piece works. The psychological discomfort Adam describes and the structural pressure I describe are two views of the same problem. We are decoupling the production of expert outputs from the development of expert judgement, and we are doing it without a serious plan.
The line that has stayed with me is this: the work that looks inefficient may be the work through which people become good. That line is the one I would underline in this piece.