Knowledge-lite work
For a category called knowledge work, it’s fairly light on actual knowledge. There is, however, a lot of clicking.
How it happened and who’s to blame are lost to history. What we know is that somewhere around the turn of the century, the internet showed up, software moved into the cloud, and every business ended up with a hundred tools. Customer records live in this one. The money lives in another. Support tickets pile up in a third. And because none of them talk to each other, humans became the glue.
For 25 years, we’ve spent our days clicking, dragging, copying, pasting, deleting, downloading, and Ctrl-F’ing. Today, after lunch, we get to export the thing from the system that has it and import it into the system that needs it.
Remember to rename the attachment. Move the lead into the CRM. Reset your password for the portal. Again. Reconcile the numbers in this spreadsheet against the numbers in that spreadsheet, then export both.
“How was your day?”
“Oh, incredible. I downloaded twelve things. Uploaded eleven. Renamed six. Deleted four. Forwarded nine.”
“What did you make?”
“Nothing.”
“What did you fix?”
“Nothing.”
“Did anyone get what they needed?”
“We’re still waiting on Dave. I’ll circle back tomorrow.”
Tragedy of Sapien Time
What’s the going rate these days in 2026? About 85-odd years we get on this rock, if we’re lucky and remember to floss? Nobody gives us more, and despite our best efforts, we can’t buy any of it back.
The annoying thing about time is that it moves in one direction, and the meter is always running.
So we take this one non-renewable, non-refundable, non-transferable asset and allocate it to what, exactly?
To becoming history’s human middleware.
Wrong Argument
Right now, the conversation about AI is stuck between two camps.
One says agents are coming for our jobs. The other says they’ll 10x our productivity. Both are having the wrong conversation.
The question was never human or machine. The real question is: which parts of knowledge work were ever human in the first place?
Could it be that work sucks because we’ve been stuck doing machine work?
We built endless portals, dashboards, and logins so people could manually shuttle information between systems that couldn’t communicate.
But now they can.
So yes, the machines are coming for part of our daily work. The part they should have been doing all along.
The Work of Humans
Humans are astonishing. And what we’re best at just doesn’t fit neatly in a dropdown menu: relationships, imagination, taste, invention.
What I’m quite sure of is this: humans didn’t survive three hundred thousand years of selection pressure to reconcile spreadsheets. We’re born to make things. To fix things. To create.
So we created Machine-like. We design, deploy, and run the agents that do the machine work, so you can get back to the work of humans.