Comment by DavidPiper

> but the work they did did not go away

I'm forming an opinion that this exact problem is actually THE problem that people keep ignoring because it is compensated for by the burnout of people who care.

We talk a lot about enshitiffication. But we also build tools that do the work of a human specialist at (say) 85% of the quality of a human specialist (much faster and much more cheaply, that is the point).

These tools operate with or without time and effort from another non-specialist person. In the case that another human needs to do SOME work they didn't have to previously, this is effectively the definition of overwork in the presence of the same expectations.

This other person must now be the executor of whatever that work is because hiring a specialist in that area does not make financial sense.

And so gradually we erode the quality of all the intersectional work 15% (for example) at a time, while adding a small amount of work to the remaining (fewer) people.

Now maybe we can build a tool that is 99.9% the quality of a human for negligible cost. But it still doesn't take very many multiplications of 99.9% with itself to end up with shit.