People in the Agentic Loop

For about a few thousend years, getting good at a job worked like a staircase. You started at the bottom doing the boring, repetitive, slightly humiliating work. You watched people above you. You absorbed a thousand tiny judgments nobody ever wrote down. Eventually you became the person other people watched. Then we handed the boring, repetitive, slightly humiliating work to a machine that never sleeps, never complains, and is wrong with total confidence roughly fifteen percent of the time. The workforce is changing, and not gentlyA few things broke at the same time, which is why everything feels chaotic rather than merely difficult. The pyramid is missing its base and no longer needs much of its middle. The junior work that used to justify hiring juniors is now the work the machine does best. So the easy hire to skip is the entry-level one. Which is a bit like saving money by not planting trees, and then being shocked in ten years that there is no shade. The value of knowledge and…