Wisdom > Knowledge

In the age of AI, wisdom is more important than knowledge.

That doesn’t mean knowledge has no value: it’s difficult to imagine how one would apply wisdom that wasn’t grounded in knowledge. It just means the knowledge itself is increasingly available by other means.

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad

How would you recognize inaccuracy or hallucination in the output of AI without the knowledge of the underlying domain?

Knowledge of the domain is a required, but not necessarily sufficient.

The Necessity of Specialized Knowledge

II remember before the broad availability of the internet and mobile phones, when you sometimes just had to sit with not knowing.

What was the first single from that band you liked in high school, and what year was it released? Who was the actor who played that guy in that movie?

You might debate passionately but there were times (often!) when the definitive answer just was not available.

I’m not talking about philosophical unknowables. We’re talking well established agreed upon facts that you just didn’t have at hand, in the moment. It’s hard to even imagine the absence of something that has become so ubiquitous.

I’m a huge fan of pub trivia, where people gather over drinks and challenge each other to remember just these kinds of things without resorting to their phones. (Though post-covid pub trivia is often run on the phones themselves, rather than writing by hand on slips of paper). It’s a bit like getting together a group of scribes to demonstrate manuscript illumination in the era of movable type.

What Would You Say You Do Here?

What becomes of knowledge workers when knowledge becomes a commodity?

There was a time when “knowing HTML and CSS” was itself a qualification for entry into the dot-com economy. I started in the agency space as a “content specialist,” quite literally turning Microsoft Word documents into HTML documents, what would shortly become a feature of even the most basic software.

Over time, what we came to call Front End Engineering professionalized and got way more complicated: Developing responsive web design, adding JavaScript via DHTML and Ajax, introducing css preprocessors, transitions/animations and dynamic variables, incorporating accessibility and performance and extensibility. That professionalization came with increased specialization, and increased specialization with hyper-specific areas of knowledge.

Entire industries were built around these areas of specialized knowledge. Knowing, for example, the WordPress API, and the template hierarchy, and React.js, and how Gutenberg blocks are created and registered and updated, became its own full domain of expertise.

In 2026, it’s not that this knowledge is no longer valuable, but increasingly just being the person who “knows things” will not be enough.

Exercise Judgement

In November 2024, Isabella Loaiza and Roberto Rigobon from the MIT Sloan School of Management published “The EPOCH of AI: Human-Machine Complementarities at Work” which defined “the EPOCH framework . . . to capture human capabilities that complement, rather than substitute, artificial intelligence.” EPOCH is an acronym for: 

• Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
• Presence, Networking, and Connectedness
• Opinion, Judgment, and Ethics
• Creativity and Imagination
• Hope, Vision, and Leadership. 

(As reported in a Sloan Management Review article).

As our dependence on AI grows, it will remain necessary to have enough domain knowledge to be able to validate outputs. There will continue to be a need to have enough specialization to evaluate that AI produces.

But the more important skills will be those with what Loaiza and Rigobon describe as having high EPOCH scores: requiring empathy and judgement and providing leadership and creativity.

If your professional identity is rooted only in being the one who knows things, and those things are what we might call “machine-knowable” (low EPOCH scores), it is high time to be working to expand your capabilities in other areas.

The silver lining, such as it is, is that this is the same guidance I’ve always given to software engineers, coders, designers, and project managers in the web space.

Don’t just be grounded in knowing the knowable, but in having an impact on the project, the client, and your colleagues. That is often rooted in having a high level of specialized domain knowledge but more importantly knowing how to apply it, and taking the additional effort and initiative to do so.

One could argue this is just another kind of specialized knowledge: emotional intelligence, empathy, context awareness. strategic thinking, and an understanding of how to have an impact. But it is the kind of specialized knowledge we need to cultivate going forward.