David Kern

Buckminster Fuller, who was wrong about a lot of things in a way that was usually more interesting than other people being right, noticed something in the 1930s that still holds true. He noticed that technology does not primarily get bigger. It gets thinner. The transatlantic cable got lighter per unit of message. The building got lighter per unit of enclosed volume. The engine got lighter per unit of horsepower. Each generation of a technology tends to accomplish the same function with less stuff, and then with less stuff again, until at the limit the stuff approaches zero and only the function remains. He called this ephemeralization : doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing. And here were it gets interesting. What got eaten, in the first wave, was objects: my door key became a fingerprint. What's happening today is the second wave: the AI paradigm shift. It’s our thought patterns, our decisions, our generative processes, our creativity, and our communication and coordination with each other that is being ephemerized. And I think judgment abstraction has two consequences. First, the output is not checkable at a lower cost than producing it. To verify a summary you must read the document. To verify a strategic recommendation you must do the strategy. The thing that made calculators safe (verification being orders of magnitude cheaper than generation) simply does not hold for the class of work being absorbed now. Which means verification won't happen because the economics forbid it. A check that costs as much as the work is not a check. It's a second attempt. Second, the stairs are being removed as a consequence of using the lift. The way you stay able to judge a draft is by having written drafts. The capability is maintained by its own exercise and by nothing else. So the fallback and the thing it's a fallback for are the same muscle, and the system that replaces the muscle also stops the training. This is Lisanne Bainbridge's irony of automation, which she wrote down in 1983 and which the aviation industry spent the next forty years rediscovering at great expense: automate the easy 99% and you have designed a job where a human with no recent practice must handle the hardest 1% with no warm-up, at the worst possible moment, on the basis of a mental model the automation has been maintaining on their behalf. Airlines eventually responded by mandating hand-flying. No knowledge-work organization on earth currently mandates hand-thinking.