CONCEPT
The Planning Fallacy at Machine Speed
Flyvbjerg's diagnosis of AI's governance consequence: optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation operating at a velocity at which the corrective feedback loops that contained them in prior decades no longer have time to form.
The planning fallacy at machine speed names the specific governance crisis AI introduces: the ancient cognitive and political distortions Flyvbjerg has documented for decades continue to operate, but the timeline on which they unfold has compressed from years to days. In traditional megaproject management, the months or years between the plan and the completed project created an involuntary feedback loop — costs that were underestimated became visible when invoices arrived, benefits that were overestimated became apparent when usage fell short. The feedback was painful but corrective. AI compresses this loop to near-zero for certain categories of work. The prototype works. The demo is impressive. The plan appears vindicated. But the phronetic assumptions embedded in the plan — about user needs, market conditions, organizational capacity, distribution of costs and benefits — remain untested, and the speed of the technical validation creates cognitive momentum that the phronetic testing cannot match.
