Ideas
Each essay in this series follows a constraint as it moves: production became cheap and judgment became scarce, then context, then accountability, until the checks themselves became software. These are the ideas named along the way.
- Migration of scarcity
The migration of scarcity is the shift that happens when AI makes production cheap: the binding constraint moves to the human capacity to specify what intelligence should do, verify that it did it correctly, and keep the institutional memory that makes verification compound. Organizations still optimized for the resource that became cheap end up misallocated, while the capabilities nobody invested in become the bottleneck.
- Accountability deficit
The accountability deficit is the gap that opens when AI agents move from answering questions to doing work that people act on, while no named person answers for the quality of that work. Its typical failure is silent drift: an unowned agent keeps producing output that looks correct long after the policy, source or context it relies on has changed.
- Executable institution
An executable institution is a verification structure that organizations used to run by hand, such as bookkeeping, audits, checklists, receipts and appeals, now running as software in seconds, so every piece of delegated work can be checked every time, whoever or whatever produced it. It makes unreliable AI agents safe to delegate to wherever checking an answer costs less than producing one; judgment calls stay with a named owner.