Knowledge factories and the industrialisation of knowledge work

I wrote this up while building Sonto.

Essentially, I think the discussion around AI agents may be over-indexing on autonomous task horizons. METR-style task horizons clearly matter, but if the industrial revolution is anything to go by, redesigning the production process itself may be just as important for knowledge work: finance, accounting, law, research, etc.

In the industrial revolution, many of the economic gains didn’t come from adding machines into artisan workshops, but from inventing new industrial processes. For physical tasks, that often meant shrinking the length of autonomous human operation and reorganising production into smaller, shorter, more standardised subtasks: division of labour, specialised tooling, QA, repeatable handoffs.

My suspicion is that knowledge work may end up looking similar. The interesting question may be less “how long can one agent operate autonomously?” and more “how can we define small, verifiable subtasks that agents can perform with successive nines of reliability?”

Interested in any thoughts or critiques of the analogy.

what timelines do you have in mind