Automation's blind spot: the undocumented tasks humans quietly do
chris_j_paxton · x · 2026-09-13
Autonomy researcher Chris Paxton notes it is incredibly common across industries for human workers to do far more tasks than advertised, even in highly bounded roles. Examples cited: a truck driver setting out flares — a job nobody wrote down — disappears when the driver is automated away, and clinic admins chasing missing patient records appear in no workflow diagram, so that work quietly vanishes once the role is automated. The takeaway: real automation assessment requires surfacing undocumented tasks first.
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