Event · era
The Competence Cliff
2030s–2060s
Entry-level work vanishes; seniors who were never juniors.
Read more in The Hollowing
The Competence Cliff (2030s–2060s). Entry-level knowledge work vanishes first, so the apprenticeship ladder that made experts disappears. By the 2060s, most senior engineers, doctors and lawyers were never juniors. They supervise systems they could not replicate. When those systems fail during climate emergencies, nobody remembers the manual procedure — the archetypal disaster of the era is a flood-barrier failure in which the only person who knows how to crank the gates by hand is ninety-one.