The people who keep the workshop that trains its own replacements going
What the ordinary version of this story reveals that the headline misses.
The background
The quiet parts of a workplace, the greeting, the handover, the shared kettle, are often the parts that keep it running.
The first version of anything is a hypothesis. What matters is whether the people involved are allowed to revise it once reality arrives.
“A fair schedule is a form of respect.”
Where the friction shows up
Most jobs are learned in the gaps between formal training and the first difficult week. What gets passed on there is rarely in the manual.
The friction is often social rather than technical. People need permission to change a process, not just a new tool for doing it.
A sensible next step
Automation changes the shape of a job before it changes the number of jobs. The tasks that remain are usually the ones nobody wrote down.
What to watch next is not a forecast but a question: does the change make the ordinary version of Work easier to sustain?
The useful conclusion is modest: pay attention to the conditions, keep the good parts, and be willing to change the rest.