AI Didn’t Make You Incompetent. It Made Competence Optional.

The tool didn’t get smarter than you. It just made every other way of working look irrational.

You used to be good at this. Then the tool that was supposed to help you got so good that turning it off feels like showing up to work without your hands.

That’s not a metaphor. Ask any developer who has disabled Copilot for an afternoon out of curiosity, then spent forty minutes staring at a function signature they wrote a hundred times before, in a language they’ve used for a decade, and could not remember how to close.

Nothing about their brain changed. Something about their options did.

Ivan Illich spent his life studying the moment a tool stops serving people and starts governing them. He was a priest first, ordained in Rome, fluent in five languages before he turned twenty, the kind of intellectual the Church usually promotes rather than punishes. Then he started publishing arguments that schools make people stupider, hospitals make people sicker, and institutions of care exist mainly to manufacture the dependency they claim to cure. In 1969 the Vatican summoned him to Rome for formal interrogation. He was never excommunicated. He didn’t need to be. He simply stepped back from the priesthood that had shaped his entire adult life, because the thing he loved could not survive the thing he’d noticed.

That’s the price of the idea. He paid it in full.

The Monopoly That Doesn’t Look Like One

Illich called it radical monopoly. Not a company cornering a market. Something quieter: a tool becoming so dominant that every alternative to it starts to feel not just inconvenient, but faintly deranged.

He wasn’t talking about cars replacing horses. He was talking about the car making walking to work look like a character flaw. The monopoly isn’t that everyone uses the car. It’s that not using it now requires an explanation.

That’s what’s happening to anyone whose job now runs through AI.

Nobody forced you to let the model draft your first pass at the email, the code, the deck, the diagnosis. You were never ordered to depend on it. You were simply left behind by the version of your job that didn’t. The junior engineer who insists on writing every line by hand isn’t seen as principled. They’re seen as slow. The analyst who wants to build the model from scratch, the way they were trained to, is now the person holding up the meeting.

This is the specific cruelty of radical monopoly: it doesn’t outlaw the alternative. It just makes the alternative look like a personality problem.

You don’t feel replaced. You feel like you’re the one who’s being unreasonable for wanting to do it the slow way, the way where you actually understood what you were doing.

What Illich Actually Measured

Illich drew a line between tools that extend a person’s own capability and tools that quietly amputate it. A bicycle makes a human faster while leaving the human fully in charge of the going. A highway system makes a human faster by making walking, biking, and understanding your own route obsolete.

The test he used wasn’t speed. It was whether you could still function, competently, the moment the tool disappeared.

Run that test on your own week. Not on whether the AI made you faster. On whether you could still do the thing at all, unassisted, at the standard you were hired for.

Most tech workers fail that test now and call it progress.

The Part That Doesn’t Resolve

Here’s the discomfort Illich doesn’t let you off the hook for: the tool isn’t the villain in this story. You are, a little. Radical monopoly only works with willing participants, because the alternative it makes irrational is usually still available. You could write the function by hand. You could build the model from raw data. You could draft the email without assistance.

You don’t, not because you can’t, but because everyone around you has already agreed not to, and being the one person insisting on the slow way starts to look less like integrity and more like showing off.

The tool didn’t take your competence. You traded it, in small increments, for the feeling of keeping up. Nobody made you sign anything. There was no moment you’d point to and call a decision.

That’s the part Illich understood better than anyone writing about technology today: the systems that own us never ask permission. They just make asking for permission feel absurd.

Whether that trade can be reversed, and what it would actually cost to reverse it, is a different question than whether the trade was fair. Wednesday goes into the mechanism: how radical monopoly gets installed in a single professional field without a single meeting where anyone votes on it.