Deployable task coverage × Institutional adaptation

Fast-moving institutions don't wait for the AI to get better at handling exceptions — they redefine what counts as a valid case until the narrow tool looks competent, reclassifying the inconvenient remainder as error. The same reconfigurability that makes this Procrustean trimming possible also makes coercion the first place narrow AI turns genuinely transformative: control doesn't need broad competence, only narrow, reliable pattern-matching at scale, backed by an institution retooled overnight to act on whatever it flags.

When institutions can absorb anything AI can do, the live question stops being what's possible and becomes who chose this — an efficient, responsive government still needs someone to answer for its choices, and frictionlessness makes that question louder, not quieter. Decisions also get implemented faster than their consequences can be observed, so rare per-decision errors compound at a system rate no feedback loop can catch in time: the failure mode isn't a bad call, it's a correct-looking one propagated everywhere before the world gets a chance to disagree.

The tool's real function isn't the work, it's the alibi — narrow AI dropped into a workflow nobody can redesign becomes proof a decision was 'checked' rather than evidence it was any good, and an audit industry booms around outputs nobody actually trusts. The apprenticeship cost compounds quietly underneath: juniors get handed the easy 80% by the AI and keep only the hardest, most context-heavy 20%, stripped of the reps that used to build the judgment that becomes senior expertise — a competence cliff that doesn't show up for roughly a decade.

Capability stops being the scarce thing; the license, charter, or bar card that makes an act count in law becomes the asset everyone's actually competing for, and a doctor or lawyer starts functioning less as a professional than as a human wrapper renting their credential to the machine work underneath. Institutions too rigid to be disrupted discover their rigidity is a moat — an agency that literally cannot move can't be undercut either, and becomes an unkillable rent-collector sitting on capability it never had to understand, while everyone who needs what's now cheap quietly builds an unofficial version of the official channel.