Prove two and a half hours before talking about thirty.
The first breakthrough is not retirement. It is a small, credible, repeatable reduction in required human effort while output and quality remain stable or improve.
First meaningful target: 35 hours.
If the worker-owned + can permanently remove 2.5 hours of human requirement from a real week, under clear employer-data boundaries, the concept has moved from philosophy to evidence.
Human Minutes Required.
Do not start with tokens, prompts, “automation percentage” or AI utilization. Measure the amount of human attention actually required to produce an acceptable result.
Quality, error rate and exception handling must be recorded alongside time so that apparent savings are not achieved by shifting risk downstream.
Start with five task families.
Pick real tasks that recur often enough to learn from, require enough judgment to make augmentation meaningful, and are safe enough to test under supervision.
Good candidates
Repeated digital work, structured research, document preparation, checks, comparison, planning support, data transformation and recurring engineering-support tasks.
Avoid first
Rare one-off work, safety-critical autonomous decisions, tasks with unclear ownership rights, or work where mistakes cannot be cheaply detected before impact.
Every teaching cycle becomes evidence.
Observe
Human performs the work; the + captures explanations, context and outcome.
Assist
The + handles small pieces while the human remains the primary operator.
Draft
The + performs most of the task; the human reviews and corrects.
Supervised execution
The + executes within a defined boundary and asks for human intervention on exceptions.
Delegated task
The task is mature enough that routine cases require only defined oversight and audit.
Participant Zero succeeds only if the gains survive scrutiny.
Start at +0. Earn every increment.
The visible + should not jump because an account exists. It should grow through documented, verified use over time. Participant Zero establishes the measurement and evidence practices that later make the `18+9` professional identity credible.