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?
Don’t get me wrong, bureaucracy exists for reasons. Not always good reasons, not always current reasons, but reasons nonetheless. The medical receptionist with her scheduling power exists because doctors' time is genuinely scarce and valuable. The legal profession's complexity partly reflects the genuine complexity of law in a society with 330 million people trying to live together. Educational credentialism emerged because there needed to be some way to signal competence in a world where you couldn't test everyone directly.
And yet.
The same systems that once solved real coordination problems have metastasized into something else entirely. They've become ends in themselves, self-perpetuating structures that exist to justify their own existence. The bureaucracy isn't serving the original function anymore—it's serving the bureaucrats.
I think about this every time I encounter some kafkaesque process that seems designed to exhaust rather than assist. The insurance company that requires three different forms to approve a medication that costs twelve dollars. The university that demands transcripts be sent directly from previous institutions, even when I have the official documents in my hand. The permit office that's only open Tuesday through Thursday, from 10 AM to 2 PM, excluding holidays and the third Thursday of every month when they do "system maintenance."
These aren't features. They're bugs that have evolved into the defining characteristics of the system.