Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

Automation: automation

6 posts tagged with "automation"

The hardest part of documentation isn’t writing it. It’s making sure the right people actually see it. You can write brilliant work logs explaining decisions and tradeoffs, but if they live in a work-log directory that nobody remembers to check, they might as well not exist. The information has to flow to where people already are - Slack channels, Discord servers, project management tools, email inboxes.

This is about building a system that broadcasts work logs across multiple destinations automatically, with graceful degradation and per-project routing. But really it’s about …

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I keep noticing people talk about AI like it’s a wave that’s about to hit them.

“Will it take my job?” “How do we adopt it fast enough?” “How do we protect ourselves?”

Those are understandable questions. They’re also a little late. If AI can do your job, the problem isn’t the AI. The problem is that your job was never designed to require the human part of you.

Most organizations have spent decades trying to remove judgment from work. Scripts. Processes. Compliance. “Just follow the playbook.” It worked because humans are …

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This article gets it half right. AI isn’t deskilling workers. It’s revealing how many of us were already deskilled—trained to follow scripts, fill templates, and optimize compliance instead of thinking. The real threat isn’t the tool. It’s that we built work systems that never required judgment in the first place. We turned people into process executors, then act surprised when a machine does it better. If your job can be automated by today’s AI, the problem isn’t the technology. It’s that the work was already mechanical. We just called it a career. The question isn’t whether AI deskills us. It’s whether we’ll use this moment to reclaim the capacities we let atrophy. read more >