From Production to Judgment: What AI Means for Workers, Universities, and Your Kids

If your job involves producing cognitive work—drafting, analysing, coding, researching, planning—you already feel the shift happening.

The floor has risen. Work that used to take hours takes minutes. Output that used to require specialists can be generated by anyone with good prompts. The thing you spent years getting good at is becoming commoditised in real time.

But here's what most people miss: AI isn't replacing cognitive workers. It's changing what cognitive work means.

The volume of cognitive output is exploding, not contracting. Organisations aren't producing less analysis because AI makes it cheap. They're producing vastly more. More drafts to choose from. More options to evaluate. More possibilities to consider.

The role of humans is shifting. Not disappearing. Shifting.

From production to judgment. From creating the work to deciding what's good. From generating options to choosing between them and owning the consequences.

This is a profound change. And almost nobody is prepared for it.

Not the current workforce. Not the universities training the next generation. And definitely not the K-12 system shaping your children right now.

The Shift That's Already Here

Let's be concrete about what's changing.

The old information worker role: You produce cognitive work. You write the report, build the model, create the analysis, draft the strategy. Your value is in the production. You're measured by output quality and volume. Your career advances as you get better at producing.

The new information worker role: AI produces the cognitive work. You evaluate it, refine it, choose between options, and take accountability for the result. Your value is in judgment, curation, and decision-making. You're measured by the quality of your choices. Your career advances as you develop better taste and make better calls.

Same person. Same job title. Fundamentally different work.

This isn't hypothetical. It's happening now. The marketing manager who used to write campaigns now reviews AI-generated options and decides which one to run. The analyst who used to build models now evaluates AI-generated analyses and determines which insights matter. The developer who used to write code now reviews AI-generated solutions and decides which approach to ship.

The skill that matters is no longer "can you produce this?" It's "can you tell the difference between good and not good enough?"

That's judgment. And most people were never trained for it.

The Skills Gap Nobody Talks About

Here's the uncomfortable truth about most knowledge workers: they built careers on production skills, and production skills are depreciating rapidly.

Think about how you got where you are. You learnt to write well enough to produce acceptable reports. You learnt to analyse well enough to generate useful insights. You learnt to code well enough to build working software. You got promoted because you produced good work reliably.

But judgment is a different skill. It requires:

• The ability to evaluate quality when the criteria aren't explicit
• Comfort making decisions with incomplete information
• Willingness to be wrong and own the consequences
• Taste developed through exposure to excellent work
• The confidence to say "this isn't good enough" when something technically meets the requirements

Where did you learn any of this?

For most people, the honest answer is: informally, accidentally, if at all.

Judgment develops through experience, mentorship, and feedback. You watch someone with good judgment make decisions. You make decisions yourself and see what happens. Over time, you develop an intuition for what works.

But this process is slow, unstructured, and increasingly rare. Organisations flattened hierarchies and eliminated the senior people who used to model good judgment. They optimised for speed and cost, not for developing craft excellence. They outsourced expertise rather than building it.

The result: a workforce that's skilled at producing cognitive work, facing a future where production is commoditised and judgment is everything.

Higher Education: Still Training for a World That's Gone

Now let's follow the pipeline backward. Where do knowledge workers come from?

Universities. And universities have a problem.

The entire model of higher education is built around producing cognitive work. Write this essay. Solve this problem set. Complete this analysis. Produce this research paper.

Assessment rewards production. Grades measure output. Degrees certify that you can generate acceptable cognitive work in your field.

AI makes this model meaningless.

A student can now generate an A-grade essay in minutes. They can produce code that passes automated tests. They can create analyses that meet assignment requirements. The production is trivial. The assessment measures nothing.

Universities know this. Their response so far has been defensive: AI detection tools, proctored exams, secure assessment conditions. They're trying to prevent students from using the tools that every employer will expect them to use.

This is exactly backward.

The problem isn't that students can use AI to produce work. The problem is that producing work was never the point. The point was supposed to be developing judgment, building expertise, learning to think.

But the system optimised for what it could measure: production. And now that production is commoditised, the system is exposed as measuring the wrong thing entirely.

What universities should be teaching:

• How to evaluate AI-generated output critically
• How to make decisions when the data doesn't give a clear answer
• How to take accountability for choices and learn from outcomes
• How to develop taste in your domain through immersion in excellent work
• How to know when something is good enough versus when it needs to be better

What universities actually teach:

• How to produce essays that meet rubric criteria
• How to solve problems that have known correct answers
• How to complete assignments within specified parameters
• How to avoid plagiarism (now extended to "avoid AI")
• How to perform under exam conditions that will never exist in real work

Graduates arrive in the workforce having spent years practising production. They've never made a consequential decision. They've never been accountable for an outcome that mattered. They've never developed taste through sustained immersion in excellent work.

They're prepared for the old information worker role. The one that's disappearing.

K-12: Optimised for Exactly the Wrong Things

If higher education has a problem, K-12 has a crisis.

The modern school system was designed, quite explicitly, to produce compliant workers for industrial economies. Show up on time. Follow instructions. Complete assigned tasks. Accept external evaluation of your work. Don't question the curriculum.

This made sense when the economy needed people who could follow procedures reliably. It makes no sense when the economy needs people who can exercise judgment.

Think about what 12 years of schooling actually trains:

Right answers over good judgment. Every test has correct answers. Students learn to find the right answer, not to make good decisions when there isn't one.

Compliance over accountability. Students do what they're told. They complete assigned work. They rarely choose what to work on or own the consequences of their choices.

Standardisation over taste. Everyone gets the same curriculum. Excellence is defined as meeting standard criteria. The development of individual taste and aesthetic judgment isn't just ignored, it's actively suppressed in favour of conformity.

Risk avoidance over experimentation. Mistakes hurt grades. The rational strategy is to play it safe, do what's expected, avoid anything that might not work.

External validation over internal standards. Grades come from teachers. Students learn to optimise for external approval rather than developing their own sense of what's good.

These are the opposite of what AI-resistant skills look like.

AI is excellent at right answers. It's excellent at compliance. It's excellent at meeting standard criteria. It's excellent at doing what's expected.

Humans add value through judgment, accountability, taste, creative risk-taking, and internal standards of excellence. And we spend 12 years systematically training those capacities out of children.

Your Kids Are Being Prepared for Jobs That Won't Exist

If you're an executive navigating this shift, you're probably adapting. You're learning to work with AI. You're developing judgment about when to trust it and when to override it. You're figuring out how to add value in a world of abundant cognitive production.

But your kids are in a system that hasn't adapted at all.

They're sitting in classrooms optimised for compliance and production. They're being assessed on their ability to generate correct answers. They're learning that success means meeting external criteria, not developing internal judgment.

The best teachers know this. It's one of the reasons so many are leaving the profession. They can see that what they're required to teach and how they're required to assess is disconnected from what students actually need.

But the system grinds on. Curriculum standards. Standardised tests. University entrance requirements. The whole apparatus is optimised for a world that's rapidly disappearing.

And parents, even those who see the problem clearly in their professional lives, often don't know what to do about it at home.

What Actually Develops Judgment, Accountability, and Taste

Here's what the research and experience tell us about how these capabilities actually develop:

Judgment develops through consequential decisions.

You learn judgment by making decisions that matter and seeing what happens. Not simulations. Not case studies. Real choices with real stakes, appropriate to your level of development.

A child develops judgment by choosing how to spend their time and experiencing the consequences. A student develops judgment by selecting projects that might fail and learning from what works. An early-career professional develops judgment by making calls that affect outcomes, with mentorship to help them learn.

The common thread: real stakes, real consequences, real feedback.

Accountability develops through ownership.

You learn accountability by owning outcomes, both good and bad. Not shared responsibility. Not committee decisions. Personal ownership.

This requires adults who will let young people own things. Who will say "this is yours, you decide, and we'll deal with whatever happens together." Who won't rescue them from consequences but will support them in learning.

Most educational environments do the opposite. Responsibility is diffused. Stakes are artificial. Adults rescue children from consequences in the name of protection.

Taste develops through immersion.

You develop taste by being exposed to excellent work and paying attention to what makes it excellent. By comparing great work to good work to mediocre work. By having mentors who can articulate why something works or doesn't.

This requires time. It requires access to excellence. It requires people who care enough to notice quality and help others notice it too.

Standardised curricula don't develop taste. They develop the ability to meet criteria. Those are different things.

What Parents and Leaders Can Do

If you're a leader responsible for developing people, here's what actually matters:

For your team:

Stop measuring production. Start measuring judgment. Create opportunities for people to make real decisions and own outcomes. Pair less experienced people with mentors who can explain their reasoning. Build feedback loops that connect choices to consequences.

Give people permission to be wrong. Distinguish between good decisions and good outcomes. Create a culture where "I made this call and it didn't work out, here's what I learnt" is respected rather than punished.

Expose your team to excellent work in your domain. Discuss what makes it excellent. Develop shared language for quality. Raise the bar on what "good enough" means.

For your kids:

Give them real choices with real consequences, appropriate to their age. Let them experience failure whilst the stakes are still low. Resist the urge to rescue them from the natural consequences of their decisions.

Help them develop taste by exposing them to excellent work in domains they care about. Watch great films together and talk about what makes them great. Read excellent books. Listen to how skilled people talk about their craft.

Find them mentors outside the school system. People who do interesting work and can model what good judgment looks like. People who have developed taste and can help them develop it too.

Push back on the school system where you can. Ask about opportunities for student-directed projects. Advocate for assessment that rewards judgment, not just production. Support teachers who are trying to do things differently.

And have honest conversations about what's happening. Your kids are smart enough to understand that the world is changing and that some of what they're learning in school won't matter. Help them see which skills will matter and find ways to develop those, even if school doesn't.

The Generational Stakes

Here's what keeps me up at night about this.

The shift from production to judgment isn't a one-time adjustment. It's an ongoing acceleration. AI capabilities are improving rapidly. The floor keeps rising. What requires judgment today might be automated tomorrow.

Adults who developed judgment through years of experience have a foundation to build on. They can adapt because they have something to adapt from.

But children who never develop judgment in the first place? Who spend their formative years in systems optimised for compliance and production? Who graduate into a workforce that values exactly what they were never taught?

They're not just unprepared. They're unprepared in ways that will be very hard to fix later.

Judgment, accountability, and taste are developed through practice over time. They're not skills you can acquire quickly when you suddenly need them. They're capacities that grow slowly through sustained experience.

If we spend 16+ years educating people in systems that suppress these capacities, and then expect them to suddenly exercise them in the workforce, we're setting up a generation for failure.

This isn't just an economic problem. It's a human development problem. And it's one that individual families are going to have to solve themselves, because the systems aren't changing fast enough.

The Path Forward

The information worker's role is shifting from production to judgment. This is happening now, and it's accelerating.

Most current workers aren't prepared for this shift. They built careers on production skills that are rapidly depreciating. They need to develop judgment, accountability, and taste, often for the first time.

Higher education isn't preparing the next generation. It's still optimised for production, still assessing on output, still pretending that AI detection is an answer rather than an admission of failure.

K-12 is even further behind. It's actively training children in compliance and standardisation, suppressing exactly the capacities that will matter most.

As a leader, you have influence over two domains: your team and your family. In both, the work is the same. Create conditions for real decisions with real stakes. Model and mentor good judgment. Develop taste through immersion in excellence. Give people ownership and let them experience accountability.

The systems won't save us. The shift is too fast and the institutions are too slow.

But individuals can adapt. Teams can be developed. Children can be raised with judgment, accountability, and taste intact, even if school doesn't help.

The production era is ending. The judgment era is beginning.

The question is whether we'll be ready.

This is the second in a series exploring how AI is reshaping capability. Previously: "Judgment, Accountability, and Taste: What Actually Makes an Organisation Capable". Next: "The Danger of 'We Produce Cognitive Work'" on why mid-tier professional services firms face an existential threat.

If you're navigating this shift yourself, the AI Capability Intensive helps you develop the judgment to evaluate AI, the accountability to lead AI initiatives, and the taste to distinguish real value from hype. The founding cohort launches April 2026.