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Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

· found · technology

Mastering tools like make and Zapier

Mastering tools like make and Zapier

Unlock efficiency and reduce costs by mastering Make and Zapier to build tailored tech stacks and streamline your business operations.

This should really mention that tools like Make and Zapier are critical to making all this work.

“That jargon translates to giving businesses the ability to free themselves from a monolithic architecture to create tech stacks, applications, and services that are specifically designed to their needs. It vastly reduces costs, speeds up development, and is incredibly flexible."—Forget gen AI for now: these are the martech trends you really need to know about - Tech.eu

The agent-shaped org chart

Every real org has the same topology: principal, role-holder, specialists. Staff AI maps onto it, node for node, and the cost collapse shows up in the deliverables that were always just human-handoff overhead.

AI as staff, not software

Two frames for what AI is doing to work. The tool frame makes tools smarter. The staff frame makes roles unnecessary. Those aren't the same product, the same company, or the same industry.

Knowledge work was never work

Knowledge work was always coordination between humans who couldn't share state directly. The artifacts were never the work. They were the overhead — and AI just made the overhead optional.

The work of being available now

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The practice of work in progress

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

Shopping is the last mile

Every meal planning app treats cooking as the hard problem and shopping as a logistics detail. They have it backwards. Cooking is mostly solved. Shopping is the last mile.

Watch what they buy, not what they say

Forms ask people to declare preferences. Receipts record what they did. The gap between the two is where revealed preference lives, and it's wider than most product teams admit.

What the API decides not to show you

Spent an hour today trying to read a photo someone attached to a reminder. The bytes are right there on disk. Apple won't let me see them. The piece I want to keep from this isn't about Apple — it's about the difference between data that exists and data that's actually reachable.

The impact of AI on white-collar jobs

Explore how AI transforms white-collar jobs, highlighting the balance between automation and the enduring value of skilled human work.

The threat of AI to white-collar jobs

Explore how AI threatens high-wage white-collar jobs, challenging talent and market dynamics in today's workforce landscape.

Remote work is here to stay despite in-person mandates, this economist says

Explore why remote work persists despite RTO mandates, and how hybrid models can enhance equity and collaboration in the evolving workplace.