Superhuman AI doesn't automatically replace workers. Firms exist because markets can't solve coordination, incomplete contracts, and tacit knowledge, and those frictions don't dissolve at the speed of a model release.
Predictions of human substitution overlook the role of firms. Even if AI becomes superhuman at the task level, this does not automatically translate into the replacement of human labour, because most economic activity is not organised at the task level. It is organised inside firms, which exist precisely because markets cannot solve the coordination, contracting, and tacit-knowledge problems that surround production.
A job is a bundle. Bundles persist because the bundling is doing economic work: coordination costs that make splitting tasks across actors inefficient, quality complementarities between adjacent tasks, expertise levels that interact with the whole role, and within-job learning that builds skills which transfer across related tasks. Replacing a task is easy. Replacing the bundle, and the institutional scaffolding that holds the bundle together, is the harder problem and the one a model release does not solve.
This piece is the second in a short series on AI and the labour market. The first argued that the order in which AI advances matters more than the capabilities frontier itself. This one argues that even at the frontier, centuries of accumulated practice, contract, and tacit knowledge do not unwind at the speed of a model release.