Oliver Williamson
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Oliver Williamson. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Oliver Williamson's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The expense report that changed my thinking was not an expense report.
It was a Tuesday in Trivandrum, three weeks after the training sprint I describe in *You On AI*. The team was flying. Twenty-fold productivity. Engineers reaching across disciplines they had never touched. The energy in the room was electric, and I was riding it.
Then I looked at the calendar. We had shipped more in three weeks than we had in the previous quarter. But something was off. Not in the output. In the spaces between the output. The handoffs that used to take days now took minutes, which meant the decisions that used to marinate for days now had to be made in minutes. The coordination costs I had spent my career managing
