bureaucracy is getting bodied by AI
some thoughts on markets, merit, and the disruption of everything
Last week, I spent three hours in a waiting room that smelled like industrial disinfectant and broken dreams, holding a pile of forms I'd already filled out twice. The receptionist, armed with that particular species of power that comes from controlling access to someone else's calendar, informed me that Dr. HooHa1 was running behind. Again.
Sitting there, watching my afternoon dissolve into institutional quicksand, I found myself doing that thing I always do when trapped in bureaucratic purgatory: calculating the economic inefficiency per minute. My time, the doctor's time, the receptionist's time, the cleaning crew's time, all of it hemorrhaging value into the ether of "that's just how things work."
This isn’t just about healthcare. This is about a fundamental architecture of human organization that we've somehow convinced ourselves is necessary. The gatekeeping. The credentialism. The endless layers of permission required to access what should be basic human capabilities.
But here's the thing that really pushed me over the edge: I went home that night and had a more insightful and diagnostically useful conversation about my symptoms with ChatGPT than I'd managed with three different medical professionals over the past year. Not because ChatGPT is smarter than doctors—it isn't (or is it??)—but because ChatGPT doesn't operate within a system designed to ration access to intelligence.
What’s more, AI isn't just democratizing access to information. It's decentralizing competence. There's something profound hiding in that distinction. The difference between having access to knowledge and actually being able to do something with it. It feels like we’re standing at the edge of something enormous. And quite lucrative.
the democratization of competence—
For most of human history, competence was scarce. If you wanted legal advice, you needed a lawyer. Medical insight required a doctor. Financial planning demanded a CPA. These weren't arbitrary restrictions—expertise genuinely was rare, expensive to develop, and difficult to transmit.
But what happens when that fundamental scarcity disappears?