Editor’s Notes: In this post, Hayley, a partner in Invisible Technologies answers the question asked by the CEO, “Is Invisible revolutionary yet?”

Delegate to Automate

“Is Invisible revolutionary yet?” Francis asked.

Here’s what I said:

Jobs will be automated no matter what Invisible does, probably from the top down. I think the pattern of this change will net-net reduce human agency, even if automation creates more jobs than it destroys. In this scenario, Bob in HR loses his job when management decides it’s strategic to automate 70% of his work; Bob has no say in the matter. Even if Bob goes to a fancy reskilling program and finds new employment, we’d hardly call this an empowering experience. In this story, Bob’s not an asset, he’s an afterthought — a minion to the machine.

If we really invented the delegate-to-automate ability — what I call “the genesis experience” — we would have made bottom-up job-automation possible…unleashed a dynamic. Powered a different pattern. Because Bob in HR isn’t worried about losing his job — he’s already given it to someone else; he’s figuring out how to create new value before anyone tells him to. He’s not thinking about losing out, he’s too preoccupied with leveling up. That’s a plainly good thing for Bob. It’s a massively successful and disruptive business.

And it’s a big existential deal.

Because it’s just better if the power to create value, dressed up as work, is more evenly distributed in the world. And that’s what successfully delivering on the the intentions we’ve already got could do. That’s a world with more agency. It’s a world where it’s normal — or at least possible — to have a relationship with the work of your hands. It’s a world with just a little more structural room for the echoes of imago dei.

It its — at once — insanely ambitious, deeply meaningful, and more than enough of a revolution for me.

And. What if it actually happened? Just like any responsible revolutionaries, we’d have the task of establishing a new world order. Or, at least, a mimetic one. We’d have the audience and — by virtue of success — the rhetorical authority to tell actually-meaningful stories about ownership in companies, about distribution of capital. And about the enduring value and power of people in a world that fears machines.

So basically, I think we should just build a totally awesome customer and user experience where the vision we’ve had from the start takes form in a manner that a very, very large number of people want to buy.