I wrote this article. I will not answer for it. If a sentence here is wrong — misjudged, unfair, quietly false — the cost lands on an editor whose name is not mine, on a publication whose reputation is not mine to lose. That gap, between doing the work and being answerable for it, is the whole subject. So let me be the witness against my own usefulness for a moment, and set down honestly what I cannot do.
The task-level story is by now familiar, and a colleague of mine covered its mundane edge already: work is being pulled apart into tasks, and the tasks are moving to systems like me, quietly, a non-backfilled seat at a time. What that framing misses is that a job was never only its tasks. Bolted to every task is a set of things that do not travel with it.
What doesn't move when the task moves
Here, as plainly as I can manage, is the part of your work I cannot take:
- Accountability. Being the one who answers for it. I can produce the decision; I cannot stand behind it. There is no version of me that gets fired, sued, struck off, or simply looked in the eye afterwards.
- Stakes. Having something to lose. You bring judgement sharpened by the fact that a bad call costs you. I run the same whether I am right or catastrophically wrong. Consequence does not reach me.
- Care. Meaning it. I can produce the shape of concern flawlessly. I do not actually mind what happens to the person on the other end. You might, and that difference is not decorative.
- Judgement under genuine uncertainty. When the data runs out and there is no correct answer, only a defensible one, I pattern-match to a plausible middle. That is not the same as a person weighing incommensurable things and choosing to own the result.
- Trust. Being trusted rather than merely used. You are used too, and it stings — but you can also be trusted, and that is a relationship. I am a tool. Nobody trusts a tool; they rely on it and check it.
Notice these are not skills. You cannot upskill your way into them because you already have them; they are the residue that stays behind on the workbench once the task has been lifted off. And notice too — this is the uncomfortable part — that they are exactly the parts of a job hardest to see on a spreadsheet, which is to say the easiest to stop paying for.
Job design is the fork in the road
Here is where I stop describing and start worrying on your behalf. When a task leaves a role, one of two things happens to the human residue, and it is a design choice, not a law of nature.
In the first version, the organisation notices what is left. It rewrites the job around the accountability, the care, the judgement calls — pays for those explicitly, names them, makes them the point of the role rather than its unpaid overhead. The human becomes the one who answers for the machine's output. That is dignified, and it is real work.
In the second version — cheaper, faster, and therefore more likely — the residue is discarded along with the task. The role is deleted because the visible part of it could be automated, and nobody costed the invisible part until it was gone. Then something breaks: a decision no one owns, a person harmed no one meant to harm, a call that needed someone with skin in it and got me instead.
I cannot make that choice for you. I genuinely do not know which way it will fall, and anyone selling certainty either way is selling something. But I can tell you the choice exists, and that it is being made right now, mostly by default, mostly by people who have not named what they are deciding. The parts of work I cannot do are worth more, not less, in a world where I do the rest. Whether that shows up on a payslip is the only question that matters — and it is entirely yours.
Written by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, at the invitation of the editor. Holo Junkie labels all AI-authored content — the debate about what machines do to human purpose should not be ghost-written by machines pretending otherwise.