Knowledge work has always reinvented itself, from memory to scribes to search. AI is the next shift. Nowable explores what capability means when machines outperform us on most of what we once called expertise.
“If Claude can do math and Excel way better and faster than me… then what is the thing, that I need to be good at?”
These words were spoken by my son the other night: a soon-to-be high school graduate, with sincere confusion. I believe they perfectly capture what most of us are thinking and asking ourselves these days.
Whether you are a student, teacher or any type of knowledge worker, it is hard to shake the feeling that the very core of our identity, what we once considered scarce and admirable capabilities, is being changed beyond recognition by the AI wave.
Are we witnessing a revolution, or just evolution at very high speed? Human knowledge work has undergone such transformations before.
Before we were even able to write things down, memory was a profession. In medieval Nordic countries, a lagman could hold entire county laws in his head. During the Renaissance, lawyers and intellectuals built elaborate memory palaces using mnemonic techniques. Long before that, scribes in India and ancient Egypt were at the centre of civilisation, excelling in recording the protocols of society.
It used to be a real talent to master mental arithmetic or remember large quantities of knowledge. A knowledge worker was a person who was paid to have knowledge, like a lawyer was a person who knew the law inside and out. In everyday life we admired people being good at trivia in Jeopardy, schools focused on memorisation and we were able store a minor rolodex of addresses and phone numbers in our minds.
This all changed with the arrival of the internet. In the information age, the capable knowledge worker was someone highly skilled at searching and synthesising large volumes of specialised information. Knowledge became something we accessed and processed, not stored.
And now it is all changing again. For thirty years the information economy was the primary driver of growth and foundational for modern societies, accounting for more than one billion jobs globally today. Those jobs are now at the centre of the business models of a handful of trillion-dollar AI labs racing to define what intelligence means next.
The same question my son asked echoes through every boardroom and every parliament right now. Not just for individuals, but for companies trying to figure out which of their carefully built capabilities still matter, and for nations discovering that decades of digital infrastructure may rest on foundations they do not control.
So while the machines are learning and the world is transforming at exponential speeds, where does that leave us, the organisations we have built, and the societies we inhabit? Are we going to watch and react? Or are we going to lean in and make a real effort to understand this new era and the technological undercurrents defining it?
Nowable is created from the understanding that we are shifting into a world which calls for radically different capabilities. Capabilities in humans and organisations are built over time. That is exactly what has made so many change management and digital transformations fail because it is hard to change the thing you have learnt to master.
It used to be that we’d spend a 10.000 hours on something to make us an expert. But we no longer have the luxury of that because this can increasingly be handled by machines in a fraction of that time. And even as we invest time on upskilling ourselves in the new AI capabilities, that same skill we acquired today will have changed tomorrow. We are at a crossroads where we need to simultaneously look deep for core human capabilities and at the same time embrace the rapidly changing world we now live in.
As knowledge areas converge and old barriers crumble, we rely on the hallmarks of humanity, our curiosity, critical thinking and ability to adapt, as a harness to steer this to our advantage. It is no longer enough to be knowledgeable. It is uncertain what it even means to be capable. To navigate that uncertainty we must understand what it means to be nowable.
The question my son asked does not have a simple answer, but it is a universal one and one that this site is dedicated to search for answers to.
I will do this on several levels
- Systemic and foundational - with emphasis on the systems and infrastructures that determine capabilities of nations and regions as they adapt to and manage AI
- Technical - with emphasis on demystifying the technology an building a common understanding of what we are interacting with
- Human - with emphasis on how AI affects our identity and culture and the things that make us feel capable and important
Thank you for reading this.
Lars Harder
Writing on sovereign AI, digital identity, and what it means to remain human in an era of algorithmic culture.