Mad Men of Tomorrow | Prompting Evolution as Potential Precursor of Labor Market and Societal Shifts
Taxonomies of teaching apply to prompting with concomitant challenges for grading output and improving one’s skills. Increasing surface area increases the challenges but when tuned yields skyrocket in output, instructions and scaling problem solving. As the aperture tightens margin of error grows, finer and finer adjustments are needed as trajectory deflection casts wider dispersion, making it easier to get off track faster. This should grow less challenging over time though the boundary of opportunity and risk may counterbalance and hold constant. Potential constant?
Observed mental effort and anecdotal reports of exhaustion are common so far. We’re adapting. The transition to knowledge worker had its own caste appearances, aspirations and norms. Not unlikely the same is on deck. But distributed, could see it without neighborhoods, fraternal orders or PTO’s. Other boundaries and signalling, though.
Bandwidth constraints, resource draws, accretive wealth and remuneration concentration likely ahead. Rents to data center value chain, resource owners, algorithm developers, software scalers, distribution aggregators, prompters who scale taxonometrically. All guesses. Dependent on the regulatory environment and norms that get accepted, norm propagators who effectively lobby.
Return to office reacting to a red herring reflecting a farm to office shift that’s passed. Remote work precursing the dynamics of a new caste. Certainly if rents accrue to fewer, their range of motion proliferates. Downstream rents could offer cascading droplets of that freedom. The mental model of remote a modality once adopted, now in field of vision, likely into the future.
APPLICATION
The labor shift the title names is underway without consensus on what to call it. Prompting expertise is one early marker and metaphor for the challenges, the way shorthand typing or spreadsheet fluency once sorted the field before the field had sorted itself. And in itself is a recognizable expansion: borrowing Bloom’s taxonomy, from remembering and task oriented prompts to analysis, evaluation and creation (co-analysis with AI inclusive discussion, co-evaluation, co-creation in the same way). Creation of new ways of organizing work, collective and individual work. Task and knowledge boundaries being reformed, recreated in not yet identified or optimized patterns. The way, say, factory work or the modern corporation or agile software development all came to be. The farm-to-office transition had its own movement in structural fact and social recognition. The physical grammar of working life and the society itself reorganized around new rhythms, new hierarchies, new daily textures. The distributed version now in motion will produce its own boundaries and signalling. Who captures the rents, and how far downstream they flow, will be one of the legible records of the shift.
