Category: Explorations

I learned something useful from performance testing many years ago. When you remove a bottleneck from a system, another bottleneck usually appears.

That does not mean the optimization failed. The performance of the whole system has increased. The next constraint simply became visible because the previous one no longer dominated.

I wonder if this is a useful way to think about AI and knowledge work.

Much of knowledge work is built around expensive activities: finding information, reading it, comparing it, writing, analyzing, programming, documenting, communicating and reviewing. Organizations have developed roles, processes, queues and handovers around those constraints.

AI is now reducing the cost of several of those activities at once. The obvious conclusion is that fewer people will be needed. That may be true in some cases. But another possibility is that the bottleneck simply moves.

If software implementation becomes dramatically faster, development capacity may stop being the main constraint. Then other constraints become more visible: deciding what is worth building, understanding customer needs, integrating changes, assuring quality, absorbing change in operations, or learning from what actually happens after release.

The system may still become much faster overall. That matters because a role is not the same thing as the activities currently associated with it. A Product Manager may spend a lot of time managing a backlog because implementation capacity is scarce. A technical writer may spend a lot of time producing documents because creating and maintaining representations is expensive. A Quality Manager may spend a lot of time collecting and summarizing evidence because that work is slow and fragmented.

If AI removes those frictions, the activity may shrink without the underlying function disappearing.

That raises a more interesting question:

If AI can perform many of the activities associated with a profession, were those activities actually the function of the profession, or merely the mechanisms through which that function happened to be realized?

For a Product Manager, the deeper function may be understanding context and deciding what should change and why. For a technical writer, it may be preserving and making technical understanding available. For a Quality Manager, it may be maintaining enough understanding of quality, risk and evidence for the organization to make informed decisions. AI may therefore push roles upstream toward their underlying purpose.

There is also another effect: when something becomes cheaper, we often use more of it.

If software becomes cheaper to build, more software may become economically viable. If analysis becomes cheap, questions that were never worth investigating may suddenly be worth answering. If quality evidence can be gathered continuously, assurance may expand rather than simply become cheaper.

So the future may not be today’s amount of knowledge work performed by fewer people.

It may be far more knowledge work being performed, with different constraints determining where human attention is most valuable.

And that is where the performance-testing analogy becomes useful again.

The next bottleneck might be judgment. Or trusted evidence. Or customer attention. Or organizational ability to absorb change. Or something AI will also reduce later.

The important thing is that removing one constraint does not tell us that the system is finished. It tells us where to look next.

So perhaps the more useful question is not:

Will AI replace the knowledge worker?

But:

Which bottlenecks currently shape this role, what happens when AI removes them, and what function remains when the old mechanisms are no longer necessary?

This experiment begins with a problem: I’m trying to learn bass guitar, but much traditional beginner material isn’t speaking the language in which I understand music. Memorizing the notes on each string, working around open strings and the first few frets, and droning through repetitive pop progressions may get me playing quickly, but it doesn’t particularly make me want to play.

What does fascinate me is a bass that goes somewhere. John Deacon waltzing and pirouetting through The Millionaire Waltz is the obvious example: the bass isn’t merely underneath the music. It has a voice, direction and destination.

I can’t play like Deacon. Not remotely. But perhaps I can begin to understand why he plays what he plays.

And I already have a language for doing that. Give me the key of a piece of music and enough time to locate the root on the bass, and I can think in degrees. A bass line becomes not a sequence of unrelated fret positions or note names, but something like:

Root → 7 → 6 → 5 → 4 → 5

Those are relationships I can both understand and find geometrically on the fretboard.

Then an idea came up when listening to Vivaldi. The Largo from Winter lasts only about two minutes. It is slow, technically approachable, extraordinarily beautiful and almost comically soothing: lyrical violin, gently plucked raindrops, a warm harmonic bed underneath.

Perfect beginner material. Or so I thought. Except the thing is deceptive.

Start by finding the root: E-flat. There is home. And almost immediately, the music leads away toward 5.

Then something peculiar happens. It doesn’t give us the satisfying return to the root we might expect. Instead, we spend enough time around 5 that 5 begins to acquire the psychological weight of a new tonal center.

Now the map has changed. And that means something wonderfully strange has happened to the original root: relative to our newly established tonal center, it has become a 4. The pitch that once meant home is still there, but merely as a passing station on the route from the new tonal center to the new 5.

Then Vivaldi plays another trick: the second half is largely a repeat of the first, but from a changed tonal perspective. And when we approach its ending, Vivaldi doesn’t simply give us the same destination again. The route changes.

Now two things conflict.

Memory says: I know where this goes.

Harmony says: Apparently you don’t.

And underneath one of the most soothing pieces of music imaginable, some small part of the listener’s brain is going: Where are we?

Then Vivaldi finally does it in the last measures: the original tonic becomes tonic again. Not merely the same pitch — the same function. And suddenly the map snaps back into place.

The ultimate resolution!

This experiment produced something valuable on its own terms.

I attacked a soothing two-minute Baroque masterpiece with a bass guitar because I was looking for a more interesting way to learn the instrument.

I discovered that a technically approachable bass part could teach me about tonal centers, harmonic function, expectation, repetition, reinterpretation and resolution — simply by asking where the root is and listening carefully to what happens when it stops behaving like home.

I still can’t pirouette around the fretboard like John Deacon. But with exercises like this I may get slightly closer… and learn a lot about music beyond what is usually considered the bass guitar’s domain. That is a win to me!