Institutional Cognition
Research question
What happens to an institution when cognitive work stops being scarce?
Working thesis
Institutions are cognitive structures before they are org charts. When the marginal cost of competent cognitive interaction collapses, the structures built around its scarcity — verification, signaling, review, education, the small research lab itself — restructure rather than simply speed up.
A thesis is the lab’s current position, not a result. What supports it is listed below; what remains unresolved is stated at the end of this page.
Publications
4 attributedExecutive Interfaces for Human-Directed Cognitive Organizations
Preserving Human Understanding and Authority Across Heterogeneous AI Organizations
Research ReleasePublic DraftJuly 17, 2026The Collapse of Prototype Scarcity
From Minimum Viable Products to Minimum Full Products
Research ReleasePublishedJune 3, 2026The $20 Professor
On-Demand AI Pedagogy and the Collapse of Educational Scarcity
Research ReleasePublishedMay 17, 2026Lab Operating Systems for Small AI Research Teams
How a small lab can run like a system, not a Slack workspace.
Architecture NotePublishedJuly 3, 2025
Apparatus
1 systemSystems attached to this program are what the lab builds to investigate the question. Maturity, evidence level, and current activity are recorded separately on each system — a system attached here is not thereby claimed to be production-ready.
Open questions
Published as open. These are the parts of the program the lab does not consider settled.
- 01
What replaces the signals institutions currently use when those signals become cheap to produce?
- 02
How does an institution keep understanding what it is doing as more of its work is delegated?
- 03
Which institutional functions are genuinely irreducible to delegated cognition?