Managerial Literacy of Thought and AI
I've been preparing for a podcast regarding AI probing questions about its impact, and my own thoughts on the subject of AI. I am in discourse against "AI is dangerous, take things over, etc.". I've used it as a powerful tool with measured success, so my "fears" of AI are not the same as others. Here is a bit of the outcome of my preparation for the podcast. ---- I think we are slightly misnaming the divide that AI is creating. Most people call it technical literacy, as if the key question is who knows how to use the tools. That matters, but I do not think it is the deepest split. The deeper divide is what I would call managerial literacy of thought. By that I mean: some people know how to direct cognition well. They know how to define the actual problem, brief clearly, set constraints, inspect output, challenge weak reasoning, revise the approach, and decide what to do next. Others do not. And AI exposes that difference very quickly. Before these tools, a lot of weak thinking could hide inside institutions. It could hide behind meetings, credentials, process, jargon, even status. You could still be seen as the knowledgeable person without necessarily being very good at governing how thought gets turned into decisions. But AI produces something immediately. So now the question becomes obvious: can you tell whether the output is good, weak, shallow, misleading, or incomplete? Can you improve it? Can you use it responsibly? Can you own the consequence? That is why I keep coming back to the idea that the shift is not just from knowledge to judgment. It is from possessing information to directing cognition. In the old model, value came from being the person with the answers. In the new model, answers are increasingly abundant. What becomes scarce is the ability to manage the answer pipeline well: framing, steering, validating, and acting. So when people say AI is replacing human intelligence, I think that is too crude. What it is really doing is repricing competence. It is exposing who can think operationally and who was mainly benefiting from information scarcity. And that is uncomfortable, because a lot of institutional authority was built on being the gatekeeper of knowledge, not necessarily on having the best judgment.