The End of Useful Knowledge

A question once sent you to a library. Now it takes you three seconds on ChatGPT. Knowledge that once felt hard-won now appears on command, and yet we’re no wiser for it. In a world where every fact is a click away, knowing has lost some of its meaning.

For decades, we built our systems of education and work around the idea of useful knowledge: information that could be applied, measured, and monetized. It made sense in the industrial world. Useful knowledge built bridges, wrote code, and powered economies. But now, the very things that once made knowledge valuable, its scarcity and its utility, are disappearing. Machines have learned to know faster than we do.

That doesn’t make learning obsolete. It just forces us to ask an older question: what is knowledge for, if not for use?

The idea that knowledge must be useful feels so natural today that it’s easy to forget how recent it is. For most of history, learning wasn’t a tool; it was a way of being in the world. The philosopher sought wisdom, the monk sought truth, the artist sought beauty. Knowledge was its own reward, a form of cultivation rather than currency.

That orientation shifted with the rise of modern science. When Francis Bacon declared that “knowledge is power,” he voiced a new belief: that understanding the world should help us control it. It was a thrilling promise, and it worked. Knowledge gave us medicine, machines, and modernity. The more we learned, the more we could build.

By the time the industrial age arrived, usefulness had hardened into the gold standard of education. Schools became engines of progress; play was reorganized into curriculum. Learning was no longer about enlarging the mind but about producing results: efficient workers, measurable outputs, economic growth. Even curiosity had to prove its return on investment.

We inherited that legacy. Our systems of training, performance, and even self-improvement still revolve around the same question: What can you do with it? The irony is that, in the age of AI, this question is losing its edge. Machines can already do most of what we call “useful.” What they cannot do, at least not yet, is care why something matters.

Artificial intelligence has fulfilled the Enlightenment dream almost too well. Knowledge is now perfectly efficient: searchable, generative, on demand. The very thing we spent centuries trying to achieve has finally arrived, and it leaves us with a strange emptiness.

When a machine can write a report, design a slide deck, or summarize a research paper in seconds, what is left for us to do? For years we trained ourselves to be useful: to apply, optimize, deliver. But AI is better at being useful than we are. It knows faster, scales endlessly, and never needs a break.

That is why this moment feels so disorienting. The skills we built our identities around are being absorbed into the tools we created. The value of knowing how is shrinking, and what remains is knowing why.

Paradoxically, this may be the best thing that could happen to education and work. Once utility is automated, we are forced to remember that the purpose of learning was never efficiency alone. It was understanding. The end of useful knowledge might just be the beginning of meaningful knowledge.

Seen this way, the moment we are living through looks less like a crisis and more like a turning point. Every era has remade learning in its own image: from wisdom to power, from power to productivity. Ours may yet rediscover knowledge as a way of belonging: to ideas, to craft, to one another.

In a world where information is infinite, the rarest skill will be discernment. When every answer is available, the challenge will be learning to ask the right questions, and learning how to live with the ones that have none. Machines can generate knowledge, but they cannot feel the weight of it. They can mimic insight, but not the wonder that comes with seeing something clearly for the first time.

That is where our work begins again. If we stop measuring learning only by what it produces, we may find a different kind of value, one rooted in curiosity, depth, and care. The future of education, and perhaps of civilization itself, will depend on this shift: from knowledge that serves the world to knowledge that illuminates it.