Episode
27. Cursus Honorum of the AI Future Part 2
- Podcast
- Great Houses
- Published
- Jul 27, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3592
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://share.transistor.fm/s/dae2f65a
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Summary
Gregory Treat continues his series on AI as an aristocratic technology, arguing that AI will collapse society's need for thousands of specialized roles down to a small handful of masterable skills — code, content, and command — allowing a single "prime" or small team to run what once required vast managerial bureaucracies. He illustrates this through military disruption: cheap drone operators using AI can now neutralize million-dollar tanks, jets, and infrastructure, meaning defense will increasingly depend on a small number of highly skilled, locally-present human commanders rather than large institutions. He argues this points toward the need for a modern cursus honorum — a deliberate training ladder — to produce these rare, high-value operators.