The Human Advantage

The meeting had ended, but the work had not. That scene remains the right place to begin because it contains the central tension of the AI era: a machine can make knowledge work look finished before the human work of meaning, consequence, and responsibility has even begun.

The argument of this expanded edition begins with a distinction that has become more important as AI systems have improved. Intelligence, as we once encountered it in professional life, was scarce partly because producing competent cognitive work required time, training, and access to people who possessed the necessary expertise. Generative AI changes that economics. It does not make wisdom abundant. It makes many forms of plausible cognitive production cheaper, faster, and easier to obtain.