Wider Frontier or Higher Rate? Decomposing Complementary Task Creation Across Automation Frontiers
A two-frontier task model writes the reinstated mass as a reinstatement rate times the distance the frontier has travelled, so in logs the robot-to-AI gap splits into a rate term and a frontier-width term. Measured on two decades of occupational task data, frontier width carries most or all of it: across nine measures the implied relative rate straddles one, against the near five that a calibration of the same model imports. The reinstatement gap is mostly an exposure gap.