The Lab
The third column of the ledger is genesis.
The public argument about AI and work runs on two columns: the tasks machines take and the tasks machines assist. The third column gets almost no measurement: the tasks, tools, and occupations that could not exist before frontier models. Economists call it new task creation. I call it the interesting part. These are working prototypes of that column.
Automation
The machine substitutes for the task. The worker exits or moves.
Measured to death.
Augmentation
The machine assists the task. The worker produces more.
The current darling.
Genesis
The machine makes a task possible that no one could do at any price before.
Barely counted. Start here.
The Expertise Flow Simulator
My essay The Liquidity Crisis of Expertise makes a claim: professions can run out of usable judgment the way banks run out of cash, solvent on paper and illiquid in the moment that counts. This is that claim as a machine you can argue with. Set three levers. Watch a profession's knowledge balance sheet over 25 years.
How fast the profession hands cognitive work to models. Speeds encoding. Erodes apprenticeship.
Deliberate spending on the slow way: juniors doing hard things next to seniors.
How much of a departing expert's judgment actually survives capture into usable form.
A note on method. This is a toy model, deliberately. Toys make assumptions visible. Three stocks: tacit expertise held by working seniors, encoded expertise captured into models and systems, and the junior pipeline. Retirement drains the first at five percent a year. Encoding capability ramps over the first decade rather than arriving fully formed. Everything else is your three levers. If you think a coefficient is wrong, good. That is the conversation. Argue with me on Substack.
The Genesis Ledger
An index of work that did not exist before frontier models. Not old jobs with new tools. New entries in the occupational ledger. Each one is tagged with the capability that unlocked it and the reason it was impossible before. This is a living document. Entries are added as the frontier moves.
On deck
Prototypes in progress. Each will land here when it works.
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In development
The Counterfactual Desk
Run a policy decision through a thousand alternate histories before anyone votes once. Genesis-column work for legislatures and boards.
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In development
The Translation Bench
One research finding, rendered faithfully for five audiences: the scholar, the legislator, the founder, the journalist, the neighbor. Translation as infrastructure.
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Sketching
The Apprenticeship Protocol
A designed loop where a junior, a senior, and a model make each other better instead of the model quietly replacing the middle. The fix the simulator keeps asking for.