Intelligence is artisanal. It is unique to its creator. Your intelligence is different to mine, as it is different to your own intelligence of a few years ago because you have accumulated lived experiences and formalised education.
The linchpin of corporate work - you.
Your thoughts are the loaf of bread of your lived experiences, your formal education, your biases and your beliefs. Each baked loaf is a little different - some are amazingly crunchy and some simply didn't rise. As the small bakery has pride in their creations (who can forget the baking/hobby explosion during COVID), you have pride in the constituent parts of your intelligence. You approach every problem believing you can somehow work through, over, under and around any problem you are presented with - and occasionally you fail, but that is ok.
In 1913 the Ford Motor Company invented the moving assembly line for the automobile manufacturing process. It changed the world, bringing the car from a coach building artisanal product into one that was mass produced and shared with the world at large to enable affordable mass transportation for the population at large. Yes, the first moving assembly line cars lacked the finesse of the cars built using the coach building process where each car was unique, expensive and most importantly had a little ‘soul’ of its creator embedded in its alloys.
Artificial intelligence is the moving assembly line of intelligence.
We are in a world where the value of management (all levels) is their artisanal intelligence bringing to the fore their unique individual intelligences. The challenge of artisanal intelligence is the embedded bias, political skill, emotions and ethereal nature of what it your intellect really is. Companies bestow upon management the badges of knowledge worker supreme through promotions related directly to the artisanal intelligence of the individual. Anyone involved in knowledge work has to start to realise that there is a contest at the moment where two types of intelligence are in the arena - artisanal vs artificial.
We now tokenise intelligence.
Tokens are the mass assembly line of intelligence in the world we live in. Companies can spin up, spin down the rate of production of units of intelligence without the limitations of artisanal intelligence. The removal of the constraints of bias, personal relationships, individual decision making trees and political manoeuvring, an organisation powered by artificial intelligence will outgrow one based on artisanal intelligence. The beauty of a handmade object is its uniqueness, but therein lies its greatest disadvantage, it is not scalable. Companies have to operate at scale and at speed, artisanal intelligence is not built for either.
The benefits of artificial intelligence is its malleability. One has the ability to use different transformers or LLMs based on the type of mass assembly required. Do you need a quick decision making process, need reporting based on financial expertise, need engineering expertise in shipbuilding, need legal expertise? Then just swap out your mass assembly line, the marginal cost of specialised intelligence is so low that any business can utilise one or more assembly lines as they require and none of them suffer from the quirks of artisanal knowledge aka specialisation.
As an artisanal intelligence worker as yourself how will you compete with the mass assembly line of artificial intelligence. As a company built atop processes, governance committees and other frameworks built to try and reach the lowest common denominator of artisanal nature will you be able to compete? What happened to the production of the car, is coming for your intelligence, are you ready?
Intelligence is like hair, everyone has their own. ~Kenyan Proverb
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