In a knowledge economy, you get paid for what you know. In a discovery economy, you get paid for finding what nobody knows. AI is aligning all the incentives to make the latter a dominant force in human work over the coming decades.
The AI labs are already an insatiable source of demand. But there's a limit to training machines on what we already know. Increasingly, new knowledge will be the most valuable asset for corporations, consumers, and, of course, our social media algorithms. Everything else can just be called from an API.
Knowledge workers will follow this demand for novelty. Renting out expertise was always the comfortable path, but as routine diagnoses get devalued, specialists will have to apply their expertise where it can still command a premium: discovering what's new. David Fajgenbaum is one such example: A physician turned cure-hunter, he uses AI to score every existing drug against every known disease and has already pulled a patient back from hospice.
This is bolstered by the fact that the barriers to discovery are collapsing. Work that used to require a national lab can now be done by a person or a startup. Take Alqem.ai, which is using AI to discover and synthesize new rare-earth-free materials, all under one roof. As AI lowers the cost of calculation, coding, and experimentation, more people will possess the superpowers to find the frontier.
All of this leads me to believe we're about to live through a golden age of human discovery—one where any individual can expand human knowledge. Millions will engage in this trade and find serious rewards from a society thirsty for any edge.
