There is no room: the sphere of automation. | metastable
There is no room: the sphere of automation.
Human ingeniuty will creates jobs we can’t imagine today.
By Philip Winston |
Saturday, May 16, 2026
The bad news is you are in freefall, the good news is there is no ground to hit.<br>We’re in a weird, disorienting freefall where AI will keep improving, and that’s<br>rightfully creating a lot of anxiety about jobs.
Imagine that automated jobs are a growing sphere that’s been with us for<br>thousands of years. But it entered a phase of rapid expansion in the late 1700s<br>and early 1800s, driven by the Industrial Revolution. For the last 200+ years,<br>the sphere has grown, but humans have always been able to find jobs “outside the<br>sphere”. So far, this has always worked.
The specter with AI in the 2020s is that “this time it’s different”. In an<br>interview, Tristan Harris said, “The difference is that AI is automating<br>unrelated fields at the same time, which has never happened before.” But he mic<br>drops it there, as if the outcome is obvious.
Instead, I see two powerful forces at work. The invisible hand that has always<br>found people jobs outside the sphere of automation, and this admittedly novel<br>phase, where AI is fueling new, rapid, even scary, growth of the sphere. But<br>unlike Tristan, I think we don’t know which force is more powerful, since we’ve<br>never been here before.
I think what it comes down to is this: where is this sphere of automation? If<br>the sphere is expanding in a fixed-sized room, then yes, soon the room will be<br>filled, and there will be no more jobs.
But I don’t think there is a room. I think the sphere of automation is expanding<br>into empty space, so there will always be jobs outside it. We’ll discover these<br>jobs, as a society, through acts of human ingenuity that we cannot spell out in<br>advance. And in fact, as the sphere’s surface area increases, there will be more<br>places where humans can add value on top of all the automation, no matter how<br>staggeringly large the volume of the sphere gets.
We truly can’t imagine what many of these jobs will be, no matter how long we<br>think about it. The jobs will be products of an economy and culture that simply<br>doesn’t exist yet. Much like every job today that involves computers would be<br>hard to explain to someone from the 1800s.
This doesn’t say there won’t be massive disruptions to individuals and even<br>whole occupations. But it suggests humans will continue to construct functioning<br>societies around whatever automation exists at the time, which we’ve always<br>done. This isn’t something to blindly believe; it’s something to watch unfold,<br>year by year, forever.