The Future of Generalist Work

The important training is not STEM, coding or how AI works. (The market will take care of that.) It’s about how people work—and how businesses so often make money by manipulating people to buy things they might not need. Instead, people can learn how to manipulate themselves .

Rather than compete with computers, people need to learn how to use and... See more

the people who can start things will be the major beneficiaries in the coming years, because the barrier is no longer knowledge or skills, it’s courage.

I don’t think that means we don’t need specialists. But as eminent physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson said, we need both frogs and birds. The frogs are down in the mud looking at the granular details of everything. The birds are up above and don’t see those details, but they can see multiple frogs and can integrate work. What he said is, our... See more

Here are eight imperatives—all of them drawing strength and sustenance from the humanities:

1. We need a way of defining and pursuing progress that doesn’t reduce that concept to something that only comes from a digital device.


2. We desperately need access to values and wisdom that aren’t corrupted by the relentless financial metrics and imposed

... See more

Model managers of tomorrow will need to learn the same things. They’ll need to know which AI models to use for which tasks. They’ll need to be able to quickly evaluate new models that they’ve never used before to determine if they’re good enough. They’ll need to know how to break up complex tasks between different models suited to each piece of... See more

many of society’s most pressing challenges – such as climate change – require highly creative problem-solving that crosses multiple domains, and polymaths may be the best people to find those solutions.

How to clarify a concept you can’t articulate:

1. Change mediums. Draw it. Photograph it. Sing it.

2. Change levels. Explain what is one level up (bigger picture) or one level down (finer details).

3. Change fields. What would this concept look like in different fields?