Question · Seed idea · last reconsidered August 17, 2026
What should not be automated?
A question about which tasks lose something essential when a person stops doing them directly.
Open question — no answer required
- Territories
- Tools
- Kind of question
- Ethical · Assumption check
About tasks where the point was never only the output — where doing the task was also how a person built judgment, understanding, or standing to make the call.
Why it matters
The useful version of this question is not moral but structural: which tasks are the ones where doing it is how someone becomes able to judge it. Automating those does not cost you the task, it costs you the next person who could have supervised the automation.
Tensions
- The tasks most worth automating and the tasks that form judgment are, disproportionately, the same tasks.
- Any answer given now is given by people whose own judgment was formed under the old arrangement, and who cannot run the experiment on themselves.
Positions taken
has response
- Every technology carries a biasClaim
The question only has purchase if a tool is not neutral, which is what this claim asserts.
- The danger is not any particular machineClaim
It reframes the question: not which tasks, but which ways of encountering things we cannot afford to lose.
Questions this opens
questions
- Which abilities should remain ours?Question
The task-level question only has an answer once the ability-level one does.
Questions in tension with it
is challenged by
- Which friction creates judgment?Question
No task earns protection just for being hard: the friction has to be shown to teach something first.
Connected ideas
applies to
- AutomationConcept
This question is a direct test that can be applied to any candidate for automation before it is adopted.
questions
responds to
- What happens when answers become cheap?Question
Naming what shouldn't be automated is a direct answer to the pressure created once automated answers get cheap.
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Continue exploring
- QuestionWhich friction creates judgment?A question about which forms of difficulty in work are actually where judgment gets built.
- ClaimEvery technology carries a biasPostman's claim that a technology is never additive: it redistributes what is easy, who is expert, and what counts as a problem.
- ClaimThe danger is not any particular machineThe risk Heidegger names is that one way of disclosing the world becomes the only one available.
- ConceptAutomationA task or decision that has been shifted from human execution to a system that performs it without step-by-step human involvement.