• Every black cab driver in London is required to pass a test called the Knowledge.

• The advent of Uber put the Knowledge on every cell phone, lowering the barrier to entry for the profession.

• AI could do the same for multiple white-collar industries.

If you've ever gotten in a black cab in London, you'll likely have noticed just how knowledgeable your driver seems to be.

Name an address in London, and chances are they'll know exactly where you're talking about, and the best way to get there, within moments. That's because for decades every black cab driver in London has been required to pass a test called the Knowledge, which requires memorizing miles and miles of London. It can take three to four years of study to pass the test, according to Transport for London.

About a decade ago now, Uber arrived in London. The Knowledge was no longer necessary to get around. With a cell phone attached to someone's windscreen, any driver could navigate the city's backstreets.

"Suddenly, knowing the name of each street in London was no longer valuable expertise, so that anybody with a drivers license could drive a taxi," Professor Carl Benedikt Frey, the director of future of work at the Oxford Martin School, told me over email. "The result was more competition for incumbent taxi drivers who saw their incomes fall by around 10%."

We could be about to see AI have a similar impact on a host of white-collar industries.

AI will lower the barrier to entry for lots of technical jobs

A recent study from Erik Brynjolfsson, Lindsey R. Raymond, and Danielle Li measured the impact of an AI-based conversational assistant on almost 5,200 customer support agents at a Fortune 500 software company. The trio found that the tool helped increase productivity by 14%, but critically, it was novice workers who benefited most.

"In contrast to studies of prior waves of computerization, we find that these gains accrue disproportionately to less-experienced and lower-skill workers," per their academic paper. "We argue that this occurs because ML systems work by capturing and disseminating the patterns of behavior that characterize the most productive agents."