This is the mythology of automation: the belief that removing the human from the loop is always an efficiency gain. That judgment is a cost to be eliminated. That capability is a fixed input rather than a compounding asset. That the purpose of AI is to perform tasks currently performed by people, only faster and cheaper. This mythology does not announce itself as mythology. It arrives dressed in the respectable garments of return-on-investment calculations, headcount reduction targets and productivity dashboards. Increasingly, it arrives dressed as augmentation itself. All of the major AI companies now use the word “augmentation” to describe their respective LLMs’ services while building infrastructure that moves in the opposite direction. Every significant platform release of the past two years — agent frameworks, coding agents, computer use, research agents — follows the same trajectory: Make the AI do more, make the human do less. None of them instruments the arrangement between human and AI. None of them measures whether human capability is growing or atrophying. The vocabulary of augmentation has been captured. The practice it names has not. The mythology asks: What can we automate? It never asks: What are we destroying?
Barton Friedland, What the AI Consciousness Question Conceals