Decision-Making Power Won’t Disappear. But What Will It Run On?

The last piece covered how AI is removing one pillar of bureaucracy — “passing along information” — while the other pillar, “anchoring responsibility,” is still standing. This one wants to push the question one step further.

Here’s a premise: no matter how capable AI gets, decision-making and power themselves won’t disappear. Someone always has to make the call and bear responsibility at the critical moment — human-in-the-loop.

The operating premise of AI-native is shared context: flattening information as much as possible. And an information gap has always been one of the fuels that decision-making power runs on.

Which creates a tension: if the traditional fuel of decision-making power is an information gap, and AI-native demands we take that fuel away, what does the “person making the decision” — the one we still assume needs to exist — stand on going forward?

First, we need to take apart the phrase “an information gap is power.”

It’s actually bundling together three different things: the right to know — you find out before others do, or you know more than they do; the right to decide — how this ultimately gets settled is your call; the right to execute — once you’ve made the call, resources and people follow your direction to make it happen.

In traditional bureaucracy, these three kinds of power are almost welded together, because information can only flow through hierarchy — only the person who’s reached a certain level is in the know, and it’s precisely because they’re in the know that they’re qualified to judge and decide, and it’s precisely because they decide that the people below cooperate and execute. The three being bundled together is a product of an era of information scarcity.

What shared context pulls apart is only the first layer. The right to know gets flattened — but the right to decide and the right to execute don’t.

Which, if anything, forces “power” to get purified. Everyone has the same information now, so whether a judgment call is actually any good becomes obvious.

Every technological revolution that’s ever shown up has challenged the existing relations of production. Think about how the Industrial Revolution overturned slavery and feudalism. Where is this round of AI going to take us?