Knowledge Work Is Dying—Here’s What Comes Next

Joe Hudson works with the executives building AGI at OpenAI—many of whom believe AI will soon do the jobs they're currently doing. But they're not panicking. They're developing entirely different skills that will remain valuable, with Joe’s help. I've known him personally for a few years, and not only is he a sharp thinker, he's also remarkably grounded—someone who faces the uncertainty of the future not with anxiety but with genuine curiosity, compassion, and practical wisdom. In this piece, Joe offers something rare and valuable: a clear-eyed, deeply human path forward that will leave you feeling more capable, not less. (Stay tuned for his upcoming appearance on our podcast AI & I.)—Dan Shipper

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Before AI, knowledge set you apart. Knowing more meant earning more. Accumulating skills, developing expertise, and mastering frameworks got you ahead.

Today, as models swallow entire fields overnight, wisdom—skills like emotional clarity, discernment, and connection—is what keeps you indispensable. As CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella made it a priority to instill these capacities throughout his organization. In eight years, the company’s market capitalization climbed from $300 billion to $3 trillion.

I work with the people building artificial general intelligence itself—including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the company’s cofounder Wojciech Zaremba, its research and compute teams, and senior executives at Google’s DeepMind, Anthropic, and Apple—and they’re racing to master the same three inner skills. Many of them seek me out because they understand a sobering truth: They are building the technology that will make their own skills obsolete. In the not-too-distant future, AGI will be able to do what they can do today—faster, cheaper, and at scale.

My job is to help these leaders develop their abilities in areas that AI cannot replicate. I help them lead not from fear, ego, or having something to prove, but from a deeper place of wisdom.

Here’s why—and how you can, too.

Knowledge work is dying—welcome to the age of wisdom work

AI models don’t sleep or burn out; they can absorb entire fields of study in days. One highly trained model will soon be able to outperform an expert in physics, law, and engineering—simultaneously, at any hour. Facts, skills, and expertise will be increasingly commoditized, and even the smartest of us will be replaceable.

It’s easy to overlook how radical that is. Our entire society is built around knowledge as a scarce, precious resource. School systems, standardized tests, Ivy League pipelines, job interviews, LinkedIn profiles are all mechanisms to measure, prove, and reward how much you know. Hence the rise of over 1 billion knowledge workers: professionals valued for what they knew and could do, like lawyers, engineers, consultants, and programmers.

Now, imagine a world where all that is irrelevant, akin to the ability to build a fire today—occasionally useful, but mostly unnecessary in a world with light bulbs, central heating, and stove tops.

We all know the person who gets a free pass because they’re good at something—the developer who ships flawless code but shreds morale, the investment banker who triples deal flow but hijacks meetings, and so on.

For decades, extraordinary knowledge or skill created a protective moat around bad behavior; people muttered, “That’s just how they are,” and kept the peace. But when a model can draft the brief, diagnose the anomaly, or optimize the market strategy in seconds—and do it politely—why keep paying the emotional tax of a brilliant jerk?

But you don’t have to be a talented blowhard for your skills to be at risk of AI disruption. The leverage has shifted from what you can do to how you show up while doing it. Competence is now table stakes.

And when knowledge is no longer scarce, what remains valuable? Wisdom. You can get answers from AI, but how you use those answers takes wisdom.

Wisdom is how to live. It is the residue of mistakes, metabolized by time and reflection. It can’t be rushed, and it can’t be copy-pasted. It is an embodied—as in felt in the body—experience, guidance from the inside.

No matter how intelligent AI becomes, it can’t live your life for you. It can’t feel your body’s signal in a high-stakes negotiation, sense the hidden fear in a boardroom, or hear the unspoken "no" behind a client's polite words.

That’s why tomorrow’s economy will prize wisdom workers. Let’s dive into their three core skills: emotional clarity, discernment, and connection.

Emotional clarity: Learn how to take your emotions seriously, not literally

Most people think emotional work is about becoming more “regulated” or less reactive. Two of the main strategies I see today are:

1. Emotional repression. We numb, distract, stay busy, avoid certain topics, or intellectualize. We tell ourselves we’ve “moved on” or “let go” when, in fact, we’ve buried something alive inside of us.
2. Emotional management. The well-meaning attempt to “handle” feelings. We try to breathe through them, exorcise them by writing in a journal, reframe them, or meditate until they pass.

These techniques can be helpful. But when we use them to bypass what's real, they turn into avoidance.

Whether repressed or managed, avoided emotions don’t go away. They return in a pattern I call the “golden algorithm.” It goes like this:

1. Name an unwanted emotion in your life.
2. List the ways you try to avoid it.
3. Notice that every way you try to avoid it, you actually create it.

For example: I don’t want to feel like a failure —> I play it safe —> I feel like a failure. (Drop this prompt into the AI model of your choice to find your own golden algorithms.)