There is no room: the sphere of automation
The article discusses the evolving sphere of automation and its impact on jobs. It highlights the historical context of automation and the unique challenges posed by AI in the 2020s. The author suggests that while disruptions may occur, human ingenuity will continue to create new job opportunities outside the sphere of automation.
- ▪Automation has been a growing sphere for thousands of years, particularly expanding since the Industrial Revolution.
- ▪AI is now automating unrelated fields simultaneously, which is a new phenomenon.
- ▪The author believes that the sphere of automation is expanding into empty space, allowing for the creation of new jobs.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | metastable |
| Canonical URL | https://metastable.org/the-sphere/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 16 May 2026 15:29:51 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-16T15:40:18.968Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-16T15:40:18.968Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | M90tpR3exLta |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
There is no room: the sphere of automation. Human ingeniuty will creates jobs we can’t imagine today. By Philip Winston | Saturday, May 16, 2026 The bad news is you are in freefall, the good news is there is no ground to hit. We’re in a weird, disorienting freefall where AI will keep improving, and that’s rightfully creating a lot of anxiety about jobs. Imagine that automated jobs are a growing sphere that’s been with us for thousands of years. But it entered a phase of rapid expansion in the late 1700s and early 1800s, driven by the Industrial Revolution. For the last 200+ years, the sphere has grown, but humans have always been able to find jobs “outside the sphere”. So far, this has always worked. The specter with AI in the 2020s is that “this time it’s different”.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at metastable.
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