The path I still cannot see

Watching my teenage boys navigate school and prepare for the workforce fills me with a volatile mix of excitement and quiet dread. The world they are walking into is transforming how human capital is valued.

Anthropic's research on its own workforce, "How employment is changing at Anthropic" (October 2026), offers a compelling preview of this transition:
https://www.anthropic.com/research/employment-at-anthropic

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐡 𝐈 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐞
Junior technical hires at Anthropic dropped from 27% to 9% as agent hours outnumbered employee hours 6 to 1. I keep returning to the same concern I have voiced before: an organisation can consume senior judgment faster than it forms the people who will hold it next. I still do not see an economically viable way to keep that path open, and I think this is one of the crucial questions for the modern workforce.

𝐄𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐞𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐞𝐝𝐠𝐞
Traditional systems still prize rote execution and domain compliance, while the frontier teams in this research are already weighting autonomy and critical judgment more heavily than narrow execution. My opinion is that foundations remain essential, because judgment needs a grasp of the underlying work, and a person who never learned that work has very little with which to question an agent. I also think deep judgment is harder to cultivate when attention keeps getting shorter, which makes the foundation more necessary at the same time as it becomes harder to build.

𝐓𝐮𝐫𝐧 𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐚 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧
The study is direct about the volume. Reading everything a non-technical employee's Claude agents produced would take half a work week, so people build instruments that process and watch what the agents do. I think that response is right, and I think those instruments earn their place when they carry agent work into a decision and a ℎ𝑢𝑚𝑎𝑛 𝑗𝑢𝑑𝑔𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡. That is what executives should be designing. More company output through agents still leaves the decision unmade.

The work remains. What AI removes is the ramp-up.

𝐼𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑜𝑡𝑡𝑜𝑚 𝑟𝑢𝑛𝑔𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑟 𝑙𝑎𝑑𝑑𝑒𝑟 𝑣𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑠ℎ, ℎ𝑜𝑤 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑛𝑒𝑥𝑡 𝑔𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑏𝑢𝑖𝑙𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑢𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑗𝑢𝑑𝑔𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑟𝑒𝑞𝑢𝑖𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑒𝑟?

𝐻𝑜𝑤 𝑖𝑠 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑜𝑟𝑔𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑧𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑟𝑒𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 ℎ𝑖𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑜𝑛𝑏𝑜𝑎𝑟𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑐𝑎𝑝𝑎𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑦 𝑏𝑢𝑖𝑙𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑛 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑓𝑡?