The Depreciation of Knowledge and the Appreciation of Wisdom

...and why the fear of the Lord matters

If you know me at all you know I prefer an economy of words whenever possible. This piece will be one of those ruthlessly efficient ones.

Human (marketplace) value propositions have and are being dramatically repriced in real-time. I am not speaking of intrinsic human value here. I am speaking primarily to labor markets.

If your field deals with words, numbers, images, video, or systems/processes then your field is in the midst of some kind of paradigm shift. For many domain experts, their moat was based on having scarcity of knowledge. The problem is that in the LLM era that moat is shrinking and in many fields has shrunk rapidly.

The time between not-knowing and knowing continues to shrink. The internet sped up that time frame, then Google sped it up further, and now the LLMs have shrunk that time even more.

Is it always right? No.
Is it getting better? Yes.
Is it free of bias? No.
Does it have all the same weaknesses as humans? Yes.
Do we still need education and knowledge? Yes.
Do we need humans in the loop? Yes.

Here is the big shift:
Knowledge is a depreciating asset and wisdom is an appreciating asset.

The human (marketplace) value proposition moving forward has shifted from mere knowledge to wisdom.

What needs to stay the same in this corporation/organization/institution?
What needs to be modular and swappable in this corporation/organization/institution?
What new systems do we need in this corporation/organization/institution?
What new processes do we need in this corporation/organization/institution?
How does human capital need to shift in this corporation/organization/institution?

The wisdom literature has a lot to say about this subject of wisdom. The most common refrain is:
”The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

As we enter an entirely new era for humanity, we cannot neglect the fear of the Lord as our first and primary source of wisdom.


Next week we will look at what these dynamics mean for a shift from specialists to generalists.


Here are a few developments in AI worth noting:
AI models’ values are very different from most people’s (The Economist)
The Mom Who Runs a Household With a Staff of AI Agents (New York Magazine)
Palantir CEO Alex Karp on the future of AI workloads:

More AI stuff I am working on:
Silicon Spiritualities Podcast

Get Ready for the Age of AI: A Personal and Practical Guide to Our New World