Systems Thinking

Doing More With Less Is a Trap: Why Cheaper AI Will Not Save Government

Your agency's AI bill will keep climbing even as the price per token falls, because "do more with less" is the wrong promise and cheaper inference does not bank a saving. It buys more inference, more sprawl, and a bigger bill (Jevons, 1865). The assurance we wrap around it measures the wrong thing and then gets gamed until the dashboard is green and the risk is not managed (Strathern, 1997). And because every platform your agency already owns now ships its own model, government AI is fragmenting to mirror the shape of the org chart, one captive feature at a time (Conway, 1968). The public value never turns up, because none of this compresses the thing that actually matters: the time it takes to turn raw information into a decision a person can defend and a citizen can contest.