# 27. Cursus Honorum of the AI Future Part 2

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/great-houses-7769932/27-cursus-honorum-of-the-ai-future-part-2.md
Podcast: [Great Houses](https://stenobird.com/podcast/great-houses-7769932)
Published: 2026-07-27T07:14:00+00:00
Episode link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/dae2f65a
Audio file: https://media.transistor.fm/dae2f65a/58f04fee.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/great-houses-7769932/episodes/27-cursus-honorum-of-the-ai-future-part-2
Duration seconds: 3592

## Resource

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.

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## Transcript

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