Research area
Impossible Work
What becomes possible when we stop assuming work has to look like it did before AI? This area studies useful work, products, services and organizational capabilities that were previously too expensive, slow, specialized, fragmented, tedious, continuous or attention-intensive to perform.
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What becomes possible when we stop assuming work has to look like it did before AI?
This area is not about ordinary automation, copilots, incremental productivity or replacing isolated tasks. It looks for useful work, products, services and organizational capabilities that did not exist because they were too expensive, slow, specialized, fragmented, tedious, continuous or demanding of attention.
Today's AI is the worst AI we are likely to have going forward. That is a working assumption to test, not a forecast to repeat. A strategy should not preserve the limitations of September 2026 models as if reasoning, context, tool use, multimodality, memory, execution, cost, speed and reliability have stopped improving.
Start before the workflow
Do not begin by asking how AI can improve an existing workflow. Ask whether the workflow should exist at all. Making a familiar process faster can be useful, but this research is primarily concerned with work that was previously uneconomic or operationally impossible.
When an attempt fails, separate a true model limitation from missing context, data, tools, specification, evaluation, feedback, workflow design, integration, rights, trust or execution. ‘AI cannot do this’ is a hypothesis until the failure has been diagnosed.
Purpose
The purpose is not to predict which jobs AI will replace. It is to discover useful work that humans never performed because the economics, complexity or cognitive burden made it impractical, then test whether that work creates a real advantage for someone with unusual knowledge, assets, access or insight.
What should exist now that intelligence is becoming abundant? Every answer is a hypothesis to test in the real world, not a futurist prediction.
Research under this area
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Which entirely new forms of work become possible with modern AI?
AI matters most where it makes useful work economical for the first time. This pillar looks past faster versions of familiar jobs and searches for work, products, services and organizational capabilities that humans could not afford to perform continuously before.