Who makes this, and who pays for it

What we believe#

Work does not change all at once. It changes one task at a time.

The film says it in twenty seconds: every great shift begins with a single task. A new tool does not replace an occupation overnight — it takes over one task, reshapes another, and creates a third that did not exist before. That is why this site never scores a job as a whole. The unit here is the task, and each one carries its own direction and its own evidence.

The second half of the line matters as much as the first: see what changes — and what endures. Every page here sets the tasks that are not changing beside the ones that are, written with the same care, because knowing what stays is what lets you plan around what moves.

What this is#

A task-level record of what has actually happened to specific occupations, with the sources attached.

Today that is 162 occupations broken into 825 separate task judgements, 18 university majors, and 1074 verified events — each with a date, a link you can open, and a written note on what it does not establish. 679 of the 825 task judgements rest on one of those records; the rest are labelled platform inference on the page itself, per task, so you can see which is which without asking us.

How a judgement is made is written out in full at Method and evidence, including when we say we do not know.

Who makes it#

VOLO is run from Singapore by Hermans Wei. It is not a research institute and not a consultancy: it is one person, working with AI tooling that reads sources, drafts records and checks the site's own rules on every build. That is a small operation, and saying so is more useful to you than implying otherwise — you should read what follows knowing the size of the thing that produced it.

What that means in practice is that the discipline is written into the code rather than into a style guide. A record cannot reach a page without a reachable source and a named verifier. A task judgement cannot claim evidence unless a record that can move a baseline is attached to it. A page cannot ship if its next steps contain a platitude, or if its 'how long do I have' answer contains a year. Those are tests that fail the build, not intentions.

Before VOLO he spent four years at Trip.com Group as a senior data analyst and project lead in air ticketing — which is one of the occupations this site assesses, and also where this domain came from. What he wrote about those four years is why the site is shaped the way it is: “push analysis far enough and you find data is only one part of a business; push the business far enough and you find that what a model replaces and what it amplifies are two different questions.” That distinction — automating versus augmenting — is the axis every task here is graded on, and most writing about AI and work does not make it.

chuanjie.ai is his own site — the projects, the reasoning behind them, and the engineering diaries from VOLO's first year, published as it went. Online he writes as Hermans Wei; Wei Chuanjie is his Chinese name, and it is the name on the co-signatures attached to secondary sources here. Same person, and both are findable — which is the point. An evidence site nobody can be held to is worth less than one with a name on it.

Who pays for it#

Right now: nobody. That is the honest answer, and it is also the constraint we intend to keep.

It cannot stay at nobody forever. What we intend to charge for is work done for one organisation — taking your actual roles and mapping them, task by task, against this evidence. What that is, and what it refuses to do. The content on this site is not what gets sold, and putting a task judgement behind a payment would break the only thing that makes it worth reading.

What we refuse to do#

These are not positioning statements. Each one is enforced by a test that fails the build:

• We do not answer 'how long do I have' with a number of years. Nobody can, and the confident ones are guessing.
• We do not score a major, and we do not rank occupations by replacement risk. A number invites you to stop reading at the number.
• We do not add capability, deployment and employment change together. A machine being able to do something, an employer putting it into production, and jobs changing are three separate questions.
• We do not tell anyone who to make redundant. Not on the site, and not in the paid report either.

When we are wrong#

We are sometimes wrong, and the useful thing is that it is checkable: every record names its source and its date, so an error here is an error you can point at. If a record misreads its source, if a scope claims more than the document says, or if something is simply out of date — write, quote the record id, and it gets corrected with the change kept in the record's own history.

hermans@foxmail.com — corrections, questions, or anything this site says that does not match what you see in your own work.

Why VOLO#

YOLO — you only live once — was permission not to think about it.

Change one letter. We only live once: the same fact, the opposite conclusion. You get one working life, and it is being rearranged right now by something almost nobody has measured properly. Living once is a reason to check, not a reason to bet.

The name is older than the reading. The domain came from an aviation product that no longer exists, and volo is Italian for flight. That meaning is gone; we think this one is better.