Shipper’s “After Automation” is the best framing I’ve read of why AI keeps generating more work, not less. The line that stuck with me: the …

Shipper’s “After Automation” is the best framing I’ve read of why AI keeps generating more work, not less. The line that stuck with me: the frame is not the framer. Models climb whatever benchmark we draw. The moment they saturate it, humans redraw the edge one level up. That’s not a temporary lag. That’s the structure. One analogy that might work for this. The microwave didn’t kill dinner. It made dinner instant. The frame “make food edible” got cheap. So the frame moved to “make food meaningful.” Now we work harder than ever to plate it. That’s the part people miss. Humanity’s response to the microwave was to invent the $400 tasting menu, where a guy in a beard places a single foraged radish on a slate and explains its emotional journey. AI is the microwave for everything else. Each new model nukes a category of work in ninety seconds. We invent the foraged-radish version and act surprised the kitchen is busier. But I have to push back on my own analogy. Fine dining survived the microwave because eating is a status ritual humans evolved over millennia to care about. Most knowledge work isn’t. Nobody pays a premium for an artisanal expense report. The frame-moves-up story quietly assumes infinite appetite for differentiation in domains where buyers actually want the radish microwaved and on their desk by Tuesday. There’s also a survivorship problem. Shipper is writing from inside a 30-person media company of unusually agentic people who turn every new tool into a new craft. Scale that to the real economy and you don’t necessarily get more senior analysts framing harder problems. You get one senior analyst doing the work of five. And four people looking for roles that haven’t been invented yet. The frame moves. The real question is whether the displaced people get to move with it. We’ve automated every single thing we can @every with AI agents. And yet there’s way more human work to do than ever. We’ve gone from 4 -> 30 human employees since GPT-3. I wrote a report on the structural reasons: how AI makes expert competence cheap, why that drives up demand f…

Source: Itamar Friedman (X) | 2026-05-23