Does the age of AI require Question Managers, not Knowledge Workers?

If AI gives us the ability to process endless knowledge then the valuable commodity becomes questions.

Talking with Max Kelly and Howard Gray just after the release of GPT 4.o about what we think the marketing industry is missing and our consensus was that it is the significant structural changes that the next round of models will unleash.?

Sam Altman reckons that 95% of agency work is going away (I was told by a German colleague that at an agency briefing the head of Audi Comms said that in two years AI would replace 80% of his comms agencies).

If either of these predictions is accurate (and all evidence points to it being directionally true at least) then what are the individual skills needed in a world where AI does almost all of the hourly services work we currently buy from people?

In a recent documentary, the architect Renzo Piano describes himself as a ‘question machine’. Piano’s practice constantly has major projects happening in multiple locations so PIano’s job has become to spend his time flying around checking on each of them. In the documentary Piano is seen walking down a the hallway of one of his offices past dozens of drawings that have been pinned up for his inspection. As he walks he stops in front of each drawing and examines it and interrogates its author. He says that this is now his role; not to provide the answers to his clients’ requests but to grill his team of architects with the questions they should be answering.

If Gen AI is now our conduit to all human knowledge then we no longer need ‘knowledge workers per se.?

(Max shared a great video that discusses AI as a ‘cultural technology’ similar to language, writing and libraries, than is not ‘intelligent’ itself but provides access to human intelligence)?

What we need are these Renzo-like question machines; a blend of

• Curiosity: they want answers
• Logic: they can think sequentially about how to ask questions and structure outputs
• Taste: this is short hand for having some idea of what the output should look like and requires an omnivorous intake of ideas and a curation of the prompts into outputs

It is perfectly possible to produce ‘good’ work without taste, just let the AI do that for you. But to create great work in any field requires some degree of taste to know what great should look like; whether its an elegantly assembled legal argument or a brand defining creative campaign.?

In another article Piano describes himself as a builder, an assembler of pieces, a kind of "pirate" who steals elements from other buildings and assembles them into a coherent whole. He likens his approach to the writer Italo Calvino, an obsessive note taker who immersed himself in daily experience, like a good architect should. Calvino began "stealing from daily life" because he "never believed in the idea of a wild creative impulse." Piano concurs, adding, "As a good Genovese and a Virgo, this method stays with you for your whole life."

This seems like a good job description for an AI ‘centaur’ who is constantly combing the world for inputs to insert into prompts to inform a bricolage of outputs that are then stitched into a coherent original whole.