Persisto Ergo Didici

The Five-Year Competence Cliff: Why Critical Infrastructure Stops Working in 2030

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Five infrastructure engineers standing on crumbling cliff edge marked 2030 with city below in fog, showing five-year window before pre-AI expertise retires and Succession Collapse becomes irreversible

The last generation who can maintain civilization’s core systems without AI assistance retires in five years. Nobody is training replacements. I. The Timeline Nobody Is Tracking 2020–2024: Infrastructure operates reliably. Senior engineers, operators, and technicians—trained before AI assistance became ubiquitous—maintain systems through deep understanding built over decades of independent problem-solving. When failures occur, these professionals … The Five-Year Competence Cliff: Why Critical Infrastructure Stops Working in 2030

We Built AI Without a Control Group — And Now We Can Never Know What It Did to Us

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The largest cognitive experiment in human history was deployed globally without preserving our ability to measure its effects. Every study attempting to assess AI’s impact on human capability is now contaminated before it begins. I. The Standard We Violated Every meaningful scientific experiment requires a control group. Not for ethical decoration. For epistemological necessity. You … We Built AI Without a Control Group — And Now We Can Never Know What It Did to Us

We Taught Machines Faster Than We Taught Humans — And Didn’t Notice the Crossover

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Somewhere in the past eighteen months, a threshold was crossed. Machines began accumulating genuine capability faster than the humans teaching them. Nobody measured when this happened. We have no instrumentation for the crossover. I. The Metrics That Hide Everything Three measurements suggest education and capability development are succeeding at unprecedented levels: AI productivity metrics exceed … We Taught Machines Faster Than We Taught Humans — And Didn’t Notice the Crossover

Why AI Makes Smart People Worse — And Why We Didn’t Notice

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Senior professional working with AI device while expertise visually disintegrates on other side, illustrating how AI assistance degrades expert capability faster than novice knowledge through removal of cognitive persistence

The most experienced professionals are becoming less capable faster than novices. Output increases. Judgment collapses. Nobody measured what mattered. I. The Pattern Senior Professionals Notice A CTO with fifteen years of architecture experience begins using AI coding assistance. Productivity doubles. Code ships faster. Metrics improve across every dimension management tracks. Six months later, a junior … Why AI Makes Smart People Worse — And Why We Didn’t Notice

We Confused Exposure With Learning — And Built a Civilization on the Mistake

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Head with open top receiving massive explosion of information from books, screens, and digital sources, illustrating civilization's confusion between exposure to information and genuine learning that persists

Everyone has access to everything. Nobody can do anything. This is not paradox—it is confusion elevated to civilizational architecture. I. The Pattern Everyone Recognizes A university graduates students with perfect GPAs who cannot write coherent emails. An online platform reports millions completing courses while employers report graduates lacking basic skills. A company invests heavily in … We Confused Exposure With Learning — And Built a Civilization on the Mistake