I reached fifty carrying a set of assumptions I was fairly confident were not exaggerated. One of them was that artificial intelligence was not really my problem but somebody else’s. I had read enough about AI’s impact on entry-level work. Last June, I wrote an article about its impact on young professionals and recent graduates. My reasoning was reassuringly simple: with two decades of accumulated experience, a decent record of published work, a strong network, and fewer working years ahead of me than behind me, I did not have much to worry about.
Then I read an interview published by The Wall Street Journal on September 20, titled “The New Ways to Thrive at Work Now.” The interview was with Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Grant’s broader argument is that AI may be changing not only which jobs survive but also what counts as professional value in the jobs that remain. Expertise accumulated over years will still matter, but it may no longer be sufficient on its own. The advantage increasingly belongs to people who can interpret rather than merely know, judge rather than merely retrieve, and adapt more quickly than the environment around them changes.
For decades, white-collar careers rewarded people for accumulating expertise and knowing more than others. As Grant puts it, “Knowing more than other people was what made you valuable in knowledge work by definition.” AI weakens that advantage because information has become accessible and, increasingly, a commodity.
Careers, he argues, are shifting from being based on ability to being based on agility. “Great careers used to hinge on ability, and now they depend on agility.” Becoming a specialist and building a career around a narrow area is less secure when the knowledge or technical skill that distinguishes you today may be worth considerably less tomorrow. What employers are likely to value instead is the capacity to adapt, learn, and rethink how the work is done.
The competitive advantage is shifting from possessing information to knowing how to use it. The differentiating skills are recognizing patterns, synthesizing material from diverse sources, distinguishing credible perspectives from unreliable ones, and exercising judgment. Grant’s formulation is blunt: “All of that is a long way of saying that human judgment is going to supersede human expertise.”
Reading this, I lost the comfort of my arithmetic for a reason I had not anticipated. In the kind of work I do, seniority is largely a stock of exactly the kind of knowledge Grant says has been commoditized. The senior professional’s authority rests partly on having read more, sat in more rooms, remembered more precedents, and being able to produce the relevant one on demand. That was the whole basis of the claim.
The junior colleague loses the task, and the senior colleague loses the advantage.
If information is now cheap and instant, the market value of remembering things falls. It may fall fastest for those whose reputation was built on remembering the most. The junior colleague loses the task, and the senior colleague loses the advantage.
A second problem follows, and Grant names it without specifying who it applies to. He describes people’s reactions as they try to identify the one skill that is “most impenetrable right now” and calls this threat rigidity. The problem, he says, is that in three months that skill may look very different.
The professional risk is similar: spending twenty years becoming very good at something, only to discover that the world has stopped paying a premium for it.
Thinking about all these issues reminded me of Rashid al-Daif’s novel Dear Mr. Kawabata. I do not want to resemble the former militiaman who, at the end of Lebanon’s civil war, discovers that the one thing he knows how to do belongs to a war that is over. The comparison is less dramatic, but the professional risk is similar: spending twenty years becoming very good at something, only to discover that the world has stopped paying a premium for it.
So what remains? If analytical work can increasingly be done by anyone with access to the same tools, then what remains as a genuine comparative advantage is largely social. Not soft skills in the training-manual sense, which I have spent years quietly mocking. Social intelligence in the harder sense: reading a room; knowing which official is nodding and which is actually agreeing; judging which institution will deliver on a commitment and which is simply buying time; and holding together a coalition of people who do not report to you and have no particular reason to do what you ask.
Knowing when to confront and when to accommodate. Choosing your battles and your message. Saying, “Yes, I agree,” and then dismantling the argument completely while remaining entirely positive.
Those abilities did not become useless. They became cheap.
Maybe this is simply another version of a shift we have already lived through. When we were children, our parents were impressed if we could recite the world’s capitals, name its longest rivers, or multiply numbers in our heads. I was good at all three. Those abilities did not become useless. They became cheap.
Nobody today cares how many seconds it takes me to multiply a three-digit number by a one-digit number without pen and paper when a machine can do it instantly. The same may now be happening to parts of professional expertise. The impressive thing is no longer producing the answer. It is knowing whether the answer is right, whether it matters, and what to do with it.
The impressive thing is no longer producing the answer. It is knowing whether the answer is right, whether it matters, and what to do with it.
The most sophisticated financial and economic models can now be built in minutes. The real question is no longer simply who can build the model. It is who understands its assumptions, knows when not to trust it, recognizes what it is missing, and can explain what its output actually means in the real world.
What may survive from twenty years of work, then, is not the pile of information I accumulated but the judgment I developed about people and institutions. Much of that did not come from books or papers.
It came from classmates and scout camps, from student elections and political activism, from years in government listening to people’s problems, frustrations, and misery, and from random conversations with someone waiting in line or sitting next to you on a plane.
These are not experiences that produce certificates. They do not fit neatly under “technical skills” on a CV. But perhaps they teach something that has become harder, not easier, to automate: how people behave, what they fear, what they mean when they do not say what they mean, and why institutions sometimes do the opposite of what their official documents say they will do.
This is not an entirely comfortable conclusion. Expertise can be documented, priced, and put on a page. Judgment about people cannot. Nor was it ever the exclusive property of someone with twenty years behind them. Some of the best readers of a room I have worked with were under thirty. That means seniority itself is no protection. Twenty years of experience matter only if those twenty years produced something more than twenty years’ worth of information.
Unfortunately, it may be too late to tell my parents that perhaps the scouts were not the distraction after all and that the school assignment on a sixteenth-century French author was not necessarily the more important preparation for adult life.
Khalil Gebara is an academic and researcher.
The views in this story reflect those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of NOW.
