Artificial intelligence is making automation accelerate faster than previous waves. With AI as a propellant, the work of building automation increasingly becomes automatable itself. As it becomes cheaper and easier to mechanize tasks, automation spreads faster—and speeds up as it spreads. The result is that the current wave of AI adoption is likely to produce major disruption in the labor market.
In earlier automation waves, the limiting factor was rarely whether a task could be automated in theory. The real bottleneck was integration: redesigning workflows, handling edge cases, monitoring, maintenance, and training. Those costs created a lag between capability and displacement. AI compresses that lag by making the “integration and iteration” layer cheaper and faster.
The mechanism is simple. AI reduces the time and coordination needed to convert work into systems, so adoption often arrives as small workflow insertions rather than dramatic replacement events. Because each attempt is cheaper, firms can try more variants in less time, discard failures at lower cost, and standardize what works. Process design becomes a kind of search: generate, evaluate, keep.
When AI is connected to tools, agentic systems can execute multi-step work, check results against tests and constraints, and revise repeatedly. That makes parts of integration—once a major human bottleneck—automatable. More workable “insertions” can be produced per unit time.
This is where snowballing automation shows up. Each successful integration leaves behind reusable pieces—scripts, templates, agent patterns, monitoring, connectors—that make the next integration cheaper and faster. Over time, that creates a compounding effect: automation capacity grows because the outputs of automation feed back into producing more automation. Adoption accelerates as it expands, producing superlinear acceleration and an exponential-like growth pattern for a period.
Firms then translate throughput gains into staffing outcomes in predictable ways: hold headcount flat, consolidate responsibilities, and suppress replacement hiring.
At the labor-market level, the first signature is not necessarily mass layoffs. It is a narrowing flow of openings—roles that never appear, backfills that never happen. Over time, that can accumulate into structurally elevated unemployment even if headline employment looks stable at first.
This piece is a short adaptation. The full essay, **The Coming Unrest, expands on these dynamics and their social and political consequences:
👉 https://korova.substack.com/p/the-coming-unrest
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