You Don't Automate the Levers of the Past
Automating a broken process does not fix it. It just makes the broken process faster, and most of the bills labeled "automation" in the last decade were really subsidies paid to preserve the inefficiency underneath. The next article argues that efficiency has to come first, not as a slogan, but as a precondition, because the candlemaker lost his job the day electric light arrived, not the day someone optimized his wick. We pull the Paradox of Automation apart to show why the more efficient the system gets, the more valuable the human inside it becomes, and the more expensive it becomes to keep scaling with sync tax still lodged in the codebase. If you have ever seen a team "automate" their way into a bigger mess, this is the argument you wish they had read first.
July 7, 2026 ยท Article 3