The Company Man
The values of a society have always been strongly influenced (and the cynical might say determined) by the techno-economic environment in which it operates. Mass-production, which enabled both mass-consumption and as well as warfare on an unprecedented scale fostered sprawling hierarchical corporate structures serving the virtues of scale and the constraints of pre-internet communication technology.
Society self-organized around corporate structures ushering in the man in the grey flannel suit where job title signaled economic power and responsibility. That world began to unravel with the birth of the internet when small companies organized on egalitarian principles (though it must be said not egalitarian cap-tables) with flat organizational structures could build important and highly profitable companies relatively quickly.
That said, the legacy enterprise and the company woman still exist and with it its culture (a culture which serves the economic and social needs of the firm and its participants). One frequently detects a hint of reverence at the invocation of titles and innuendo about the number of souls beneath them in the company.
AI is going to accelerate the demise of this world perhaps more profoundly than the internet. If the internet enabled new, decentralized business models and corporate structures, AI is going to eliminate a lot of the advantages of having knowledge workers do things for you.
Consider the time it takes to provide sufficient context to a person (including mapping to supporting materials) and the subsequent iterations and drafting relative to kicking off a task than an AI can handle with Willo and Claude. It is astounding how a single individual who is not using AI can slow down the entirety of an AI-native company. This new paradigm is going to be characterized by highly-leveraged teams with a very small number of humans in them.
As the new economy emerges and becomes consensus new social norms will emerge as we have to develop new ways to quickly asses where our peers are in the economic foot race. I've been thinking a lot about what the values of a AI-diffused capitalist economy will be and the new sigils of hierarchy which I hope I will be able to articulate here in the coming months.