No. 036 · Week 44 · Kieran Klaassen · Exploring
Human in the loop: four levels of automation
Ten kinds of work rated from fully human to fully automated, today and a year out. Everything moves except coordination.
As AI gets cheaper, which work should we stay in the loop for?
People want people. They don't want AI slop. So I took the kinds of work we all do and rated each one on four levels, from fully human to fully automated. Almost everything moved, except one.
The four levels
- Human. No AI involved.
- Human in the loop. You work with an agent in real time, back and forth, iterating fast.
- Orchestrate. You hand the work to an agent and decide when to start it.
- Automate. The agent also decides when to run. The human is out of the loop.
I don't think everything should be automated. Some things clearly can be. Others we need to keep doing ourselves. As AI gets cheaper, the question is where to put your own attention, so I rated the work I actually do.
Where it sits today
| Kind of work | Level |
|---|---|
| Strategy and goal setting | Human in the loop |
| Product and system design | Human in the loop |
| Discovery and research | Orchestrate |
| Marketing and content | Orchestrate |
| Sales and customer success | Orchestrate |
| Coding and building | Automate |
| Debugging and maintenance | Automate |
| Review and QA | Automate |
| Coordination and PM | Human |
Strategy stays in the loop. Vision, OKRs, pricing, deciding what not to build. Use AI to do the research and then iterate hard, but the bigger picture needs human creativity.
Coding is automated, but only because debugging is. I put coding and building in automate: LFG. That only works because debugging and maintenance are automated too. If you don't have the stack to validate and check things in production, I would not automate the building.
Research and marketing are orchestrated. Ask for market research on all of these things, then come back into the loop with what it found. Launches, posts and demos don't gain much from a human in the loop once the system is set up right.
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