AI Task Ecology Playbook
A working instrument for the question underneath every “AI adoption” conversation: not what will the technology do to the workforce, but what does this intervention do to this task, here.
The Unit of Work, Not the Industry
“AI adoption” sounds like a single phenomenon until you notice that the same model enters a pharmacy, a law firm, a classroom, a design studio, a hospital. A task ecology is the smaller, truer unit underneath the industry-level story — the actual bundle of visible output, apprenticeship, judgment, and invisible labor that a given task is quietly producing alongside whatever shows up in the job description.
The Playbook is a companion instrument to Ashby’s Accordion and Chesterton’s Fence Has a Payroll: it exists to make the task ecology of a specific role legible before anyone decides what to automate, and to keep asking what gets compressed, transferred, removed, or newly required once an intervention lands.
The Playbook is built as a live, working tool rather than an essay — bring a real task to it and map its ecology before you redesign it.