Turns out everyone wants to remove every other person who's a bottleneck and make things more efficient with AI.

I'm like... how can that be the primary goal?

If you care about people, if you care about civilization, and you want things to go well, shouldn't we have a better answer than simply "remove the bottleneck"?

I believe this "remove the bottleneck" movement, the way it's currently being pursued, is one of the worst ideas the AI industry has orchestrated.

Why?

Because bottlenecks aren't just inefficiencies. They're often where human judgment is formed.

Think about how expertise actually develops.

A junior developer works, learns, and becomes a senior.

Then they lead a team, become an engineering manager, and eventually a CTO.

Then they help the CEO execute new ideas in the market.

Every step is really a process of developing judgment.

Now scale that process from an individual to an entire civilization.

The more people capable of exercising judgment, the more proactive that civilization becomes.

The fewer people who exercise judgment, the weaker and more apathetic that civilization becomes.

Our social media has already pushed us toward a reactive civilization, where gossip happens at a global scale but very little reflection happens.

So both futures are bad.

A reactive civilization is a distracted, weak entity.

An apathetic civilization, where AI does all the thinking, is also a dead end.

Why not use AI to build a proactive civilization instead?

How do we get there?

First of all, stop talking about "removing the bottleneck."

AI shouldn't remove humans from the loop.

It should move them up the loop.

The goal isn't to make humans unnecessary.

It's to make humans more capable in a much shorter period of time.

Previously it took two or three years for a junior developer to become a senior.

Now we have AI on our side.

So ask a different question:

How can every single person operate one or two levels higher in the organization?

Take that junior developer again.

Strip away the routine work, the bug triage, the repetitive tasks, the endless context switching.

They don't just ship faster.

They spend their actual brainpower on architecture, trade-offs, and system design -- things they normally wouldn't encounter for years.

The AI doesn't simply hand them the answer.

It points out blind spots in their reasoning.

It simulates second-order consequences.

It forces them to defend their decisions.

In a year, they're making decisions that previously required a senior engineer.

Instead of replacement, we must think accelerated human growth.

That's the workflow we should be obsessed with.

The task gets done.

But more importantly, the human gets upgraded every single day.

So what's the choice?

Option one: Reactive civilization -- doomscrolling, global gossip, very little reflection.

Option two: Apathetic civilization -- AI does everything while humans gradually stop exercising judgment.

Option three: Proactive civilization -- AI exists to sharpen judgment, not replace it. We design workflows that produce better humans, not just faster outputs.

In ten years, we don't just have smarter machines.

We have a civilization that's better at making decisions.

That's the future worth building.

Stop talking about removing the bottleneck.

Start talking about upgrading it.