Automation and Stability as Foundations of Sustainable Growth

TD;DR Progress is not measured by how much work we do, but by how much work we permanently eliminate.

There are two forces that quietly determine whether a technical system grows sustainably or collapses under its own weight: automation and stability. They are rarely celebrated, often invisible, and yet they are the only reasons complex systems can exist at all. Everything else - speed, innovation, creativity, even economic growth - depends on them.

This article argues for a simple but uncomfortable thesis: progress only becomes permanent once humans are removed from loops wherever human judgment is not strictly required. Automation and stability are not optional optimizations. They are the foundation.

• Automation as Compounded Human Time
• Stability as the Precondition for Automation
• The Cultural Bias Against Stability
• Getting Humans Out of the Loop

Automation as Compounded Human Time

Automation is often framed as a productivity trick: something that makes work cheaper or faster. This framing misses its true power.

This is not merely an intuition shared by engineers. Empirical studies consistently show that automation produces compounding returns over time. Large-scale analyses of industrial and software automation report productivity gains in the range of 20-30%, with error rates reduced by more than half, and return on investment often achieved within a year. Crucially, these gains scale with usage: once a task is automated, executing it a thousand times is not meaningfully more expensive than executing it once. Automation is about freeing human lifetime permanently. Every task that is automated correctly disappears from the list of things a human ever needs to think about again.

A well-designed automated system does not merely execute one task faster - it scales, parallelizes, and repeats flawlessly. Whether it runs once a day or ten thousand times an hour does not matter. The cost of execution approaches zero, while the value compounds over time.

This is why short-term arguments against automation are fundamentally flawed. Doing something manually may look cheaper or faster today, but it locks humans into repetition. The automated solution may take longer to build, but once finished, it keeps paying dividends indefinitely.

Modern build and deployment pipelines illustrate this clearly.

Case studies from industry show how dramatic this effect can be. Organizations that moved from manual deployment processes to fully automated CI/CD pipelines report deployment time reductions of well over 90%, while simultaneously lowering failure rates. In such systems, humans no longer “deploy software” at all - they merely describe desired outcomes, and the system enforces them. A properly configured automation server can compile software, run tests, package artifacts, publish releases, update websites, and deploy services without human intervention. Once such a pipeline exists, the entire category of routine work simply vanishes. Humans move on. The system keeps running.

Automation should aim to eliminate as many repetitive jobs as possible.

Economic research repeatedly arrives at an uncomfortable conclusion: automation itself is not the primary driver of social harm. The damage arises when societies fail to provide transition mechanisms for displaced workers. Where retraining, income support, and mobility over various fields of expertise exist, automation correlates with rising productivity and long-term prosperity. Where they do not, automation merely exposes structural neglect.

Killing jobs is not a flaw - it is the point. The tragedy is not that automation removes jobs, but that society often responds by punishing those whose labor has been freed, instead of redistributing time, security, and opportunity. This is a social failure, not a technical one.

Stability as the Precondition for Automation

Automation only works if the systems being automated are stable. Without stability, automation collapses into endless maintenance, and the human is dragged back into the loop. Stability means more than uptime. It means that interfaces do not break, that upgrades do not invalidate existing systems, and that components evolve without forcing constant adaptation. A stable system can run unattended for years or decades, maybe even centuries. An unstable one demands continuous supervision.

In software, this distinction is stark.

This cost is not hypothetical. Studies of software ecosystems show that frequent breaking changes dramatically increase maintenance effort downstream. Fast-moving ecosystems that deprioritize backward compatibility force developers to spend large fractions of their time simply keeping existing systems functional, while stability-oriented ecosystems enable long-lived, unattended software. If every update breaks APIs, changes configuration formats, or introduces incompatible behavior, then automatic upgrades become impossible. Engineers are forced to pin versions, freeze dependencies, or manually intervene - all of which destroy the long-term value of automation.

True stability requires strict downward compatibility. Libraries, protocols, and tools must treat existing users as first-class constraints. Security improvements, performance enhancements, and bug fixes should flow automatically into running systems without forcing rewrites or redesigns. Only then does the vision of self-updating, long-running infrastructure become real. Only then can systems be deployed once and left to improve themselves over time, with humans completely out of the operational loop.

The Cultural Bias Against Stability

Despite its importance, stability is culturally undervalued. Organizational and management research repeatedly observe a bias toward visible crisis response over preventive work. Firefighting creates urgency, urgency creates recognition, and recognition shapes incentives. The result is a culture that unintentionally rewards fragility, because fragility generates heroic moments. Modern work culture often celebrates speed, disruption, and constant motion, while quietly penalizing systems that simply work.

Hustle culture_ glorifies firefighting. Engineers are praised for fixing broken systems at 3AM, while those who designed systems that never break receive little attention. Fragility creates urgency, and urgency creates the illusion of importance. As a result, unstable systems that consume vast amounts of human time are often rewarded more than stable ones that silently eliminate work. Projects that constantly reinvent themselves appear dynamic, while long-lived, boring infrastructure is dismissed as uninteresting.

This cultural bias has consequences. Endless framework churn, breaking changes, and short-lived toolchains generate massive hidden costs. Entire careers are spent maintaining instability that should never have existed. Innovation slows, not because progress is hard, but because attention is constantly drained by preventable failures and the most valueable resource - human time - is drained on unnecessary hacks and fixes. Stability is not stagnation. Automation is not laziness. They are what make real innovation possible - by clearing mental space, reducing cognitive load and allowing humans to focus on genuinely new problems instead of endlessly repairing old ones.

Getting Humans Out of the Loop

The ultimate goal of engineering should be clear: remove humans from processes that do not require human judgment. Every manual intervention is a sign of an incomplete system. This does not mean eliminating creativity, responsibility, or decision-making. It means reserving human effort for tasks that actually benefit from human insight. Machines should handle repetition, coordination, verification, and execution - relentlessly and without fatigue.

Automation without stability collapses. Stability without automation stagnates. Together, they form the only sustainable path forward. The evidence is already clear; what is missing is the cultural willingness to act on it.

Progress is not measured by how much work we do, but by how much work we permanently eliminate.

This article is tagged:

• Opinion
• Society