The Last Tool

This essay describes how work will change over the next ten to fifteen years, and above all the tool it will be done with: not an application a person operates, but an agent that does the work and that the person directs. Drawing on the author's own use of such agents at his company, it argues that the long succession of tools a worker learns ends in a single agent, reached like an email account, that generates whatever interface is needed and carries out the task. It separates the knowledge of how a task is done, which moves into the machine and loses its value, from the judgement of whether a result is good, which the person keeps and forms by measuring the agent's output against what actually works. It faces the objection that delegating to an agent means it decides for you, and the objection that this destroys jobs, arguing that people will be hired for the problems they solve rather than the tools they can operate. It traces what the shift carries with it: remote work, agents dealing with one another, lighter machines backed by computing power held on a provider's servers, and a worker measured by what they imagine and solve rather than by the tools they have mastered.