Knowledge work is a bundle of activities and AI is unbundling them

Most people don't normally worry about philosophical questions like why our work is structured the way it is, but with AI shuffling everything around, now might be a good time.

When you look at most office jobs, they're actually two different things bundled together. There's a worker part - creating documents, filling out forms, sending emails. And there's a manager part - setting goals, dealing with tradeoffs, organizing projects. This split goes all the way back to the original definition of "knowledge workers" by Peter Drucker in the 1960s: people who both do the work and manage themselves, because only they can manage their specialized work.

Seen that way, AI is splitting apart the jobs we currently have. By handling more and more of the worker tasks, AI is pushing us into the manager role. And when you were only managing yourself, you could be pretty loose about what exactly you were doing. If you need to clarify the work, you just ask...yourself. But when you're delegating, whether to AI or just other humans, you need to be much clearer about what exactly each task is - what format is the output, how quality is judged, and so on. More than that, you need to think through what your job actually is - what worker tasks do you do and how can you separate them out.

We're increasingly becoming managers of our own little human + AI departments. Even if you never manage another person, you're going to need to learn some of these "manager" skills.