We are drowning in answers. Every time you enter a prompt, you get a response that is grammatically perfect and logically plausible. Because the cost of the answer has dropped to near zero, the value has moved entirely upstream to the Question. Framing the problem is now the most important part of solving it.
For over a century, expertise was defined by what you knew. If you had the answers, you had the power. But as Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, noted in the recent NY Times panel, we are entering an age where answers are becoming a commodity.
When work moves at the speed of AI, a dangerous gap opens up between doing and owning. In slower systems, the time and coordination it took to complete a project naturally made responsibility visible. You knew who made the choice because the choice took manual effort.
In the old world of work, we were governed by scarcity. Because it was physically hard to produce anything, we assumed that more production equaled more value. But as AI removes the cost of making, we are entering a state of mediocre abundance.
There is a fundamental shift happening in the professional world that is often misunderstood as a simple replacement of jobs. We hear that AI will automate entry-level roles, but the real story is about the total redefinition of seniority. Seniority is no longer about how much you can produce; it is about how well you can steer.
There is a dangerous myth in the age of automation: the idea that the expert is someone who writes one brilliant prompt, hits generate, and walks away. In reality, especially in an environment driven by AI velocity, judgment is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing commitment. It is a practice, not a moment.
We were promised that AI would eliminate the friction from our professional lives. The dream was simple: offload the tedious drafting, the manual data sorting, and the grunt work to the machine so we could focus on high-level strategy. But as anyone working in the trenches of AI-enabled workflows knows, friction is a law of nature. It does not simply disappear; it relocates.
There is a quiet exhaustion settling into the modern workplace. It is not the exhaustion of physical labor or even the typical burnout of long hours. It is the weight of constant, unbuffered decision-making.
For decades, the primary constraint on progress was execution. If a project stalled, it was usually because of tangible scarcity: not enough budget, not enough time, or not enough people. That friction was often unwelcome, but it served a vital, hidden purpose.
Over the last year, AI-enabled tools have radically accelerated the pace of work. Tasks that once took days now compress into seconds. Drafts appear instantly. Cycles shorten. We expected this speed to make work lighter, but for many of us, the opposite has happened.