How Knowledge Work Will Evolve in the AI Era

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In the 1470s, Venetian scribe Filippo de Strata penned a meditation on the practice of writing. “Writing,” he said, “should be respected and held nobler than all goods.” As a member of the quill-wielding guild, I tend to enthusiastically agree—but Filippo didn’t stop there. He added: “[U]nless she has suffered degradation in the brothel of the printing presses. She is a maiden with a pen, a harlot in print.”

Ooof.

Putting aside Filippo’s 15th-century ideas about female virtue, his disdain for the printing press was pretty common at the time. Many believed that this new machine didn’t democratize knowledge but debased it—by, say, prioritizing quick production over scholarly integrity.

This view didn’t age well, to say the least. It didn’t take long for the printing press to revolutionize the way knowledge was preserved and spread. By the 1600s its impacts were already legend. In 1620, British philosopher Francis Bacon wrote that the printing press was one of three innovations “unknown to the ancients” that “changed the appearance and state of the whole word.” (The other two were gunpowder and the compass.)

Flash-forward to the AI era of today. Almost daily we’re forced to reckon with fresh evidence that the powers of large language models and generative AI will upend industries and automate away human labor. It’s no wonder, then, that much of the conversation around the disruption AI is causing is laced with fear.

We can do better. Some worry is certainly warranted. Very little has been figured out as to what will become of workers affected by automation, for example, and there are many credible cases to be made about the harms of blindly adopting AI in various domains. But knee-jerk reactionary “new tech is bad” thinking is just as unhelpful as uncritical boosterism. Finding a middle ground means examining the changes brought about by AI, and our reactions to them, as they occur—in order to help us make more thoughtful decisions about a technology that is undeniably changing the world.

When tools form part of our identities

The printing press mimicked writing and copying books in longhand, a skill that Fillipo and other scribes held close to their hearts. It helped them make a living, defined their role in society, and arguably formed part of their self-worth. So it’s only natural that their first reaction to it being taken away was rejection. This feeling dissipated over time; subsequent generations of writers learned how to use printing presses to spread their work far and wide, vastly amplifying its impact. Skills didn’t disappear—they shifted.

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