Knowledge work is already over in America

What was discussed

Jeewon is a lawyer 21 years into her career. She spent eight years leading data privacy at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, worked across financial institutions and a global data broker, and advised companies like Meta, eBay, LVMH, Sony, and Shell on their digital transformations. Then she gave up her partnership at a San Francisco law firm to start an AI-native financial service for the American middle class. At forty-seven, she said, she is doing zero to one for the first time.

She compared Silicon Valley to the canary in the coal mine. Pessimism about AI, she observed, runs deeper inside Silicon Valley than outside it, while Korea sits among the most optimistic places in the world. She also pointed to the shape of the money: 80% of global venture capital is concentrated in Silicon Valley, and 80% of that flows again to founders already there. Close to inbreeding, was how she put it.

She laid out the stages of AI like this. Today's AI works like an intern, agentic AI runs the work on its own, and AGI starts making the judgment calls itself. On quantum computing, she warned that every encryption scheme will be rendered useless and there is still no answer to it. The point was that we are pushing innovation faster than we are preparing for the unintended consequences.

The crisis in knowledge work, she said, is already here. She became certain of it after seeing a legal tech product built by a lawyer friend. Layoffs keep coming, 600 at eBay and 1,000 at Intuit, and citing research from OpenAI and Anthropic she said the top 40 to 60 job categories are under pressure to be replaced. If you are thirty today, she said, holding the same job for thirty years will be difficult.

On Korea she turned the conventional wisdom around. Rather than criticizing a homogeneous culture for making people avoid risk, she proposed reading it as a competitive advantage. Picture fifteen founders in Busan building one company together instead of competing separately. They share a context that diverse American teams have a hard time getting. She also looked outside Silicon Valley for where the opportunity sits. Albuquerque, New Mexico has three national laboratories, the highest share of PhDs in the country, and large oil-funded endowments, which she argued makes it the better place for physical AI, robotics, and infrastructure.

The most striking part was her view of what a business is for. She said the Korean government has to deal with people's unhappiness before it deals with AI policy. Unless the country can reverse the highest suicide rate and the lowest birth rate, she said, it will disappear. What business ultimately sells, she concluded, is happiness. The window to enter the U.S. market is one to two years and it is already closing, so the timing is now, and it is today. That is how she closed.