The Verification Asymmetry

I left a promise unpaid at the end of the first essay in this series: the combined harvester never claimed to think, and the AI model does, which is the one genuinely novel element in the present anxiety. This essay pays this debt, and the answer is less comfortable than the 'psychological debt' framework it displaces.Taking myself as a worked example of this. If I put a language model to work on a question of delegated authority, or the conditions under which a team will tell its leader an unwelcome thing, I can audit the output claim by claim. I know where the literature is so thin as to be positively translucent, and where the confident summary generated has quietly elided a contested finding. I can tell when the machine has produced something that reads beautifully and means nothing, because I have spent years mastering the subject matter. Put the same model to work on the tax advice for a discretionary trust distribution and I am a different operator entirely. The prose has the…