How AI Destroys Institutions
My conversation with Prof. Woodrow Hartzog and Prof. Jessica Silbey about their new paper on AI's negative impact on society | Edition #275
Last week, I sat with Prof. Woodrow Hartzog and Prof. Jessica Silbey to discuss their excellent new paper, “How AI Destroys Institutions.”
Their paper has been downloaded more than 30,000 times since December 2025, and it has resonated with many who have felt uncomfortable with the negative ways AI has been impacting people and society.
We spoke about the paper’s main concepts, the sense in which institutions are being destroyed, as well as the ways in which AI has affected how we work, write, think, and live.
If you are interested in AI, read their paper, and do not miss our 56-minute conversation:
Video chapters:
00:00 - Introduction
00:40 - The story behind the paper
05:18 - The role of legal scholars in AI governance
12:06 - What are institutions and how AI impacts them
13:30 - How to address these issues?
20:43 - The destructive characteristics of AI systems
24:00 - Is human nature going to change?
25:17 - The destruction of expertise
34:21 - AI and writing
39:24 - Claude's new constitution
44:02 - The problem with “AI as a new species”
47:33 - AI companions
54:16 - Final message
This free edition is sponsored by AgentCloak:
Compliance teams are now requiring AI systems to operate with only the essential data, a priority in Europe under the EU AI Act. AgentCloak seamlessly cloaks and uncloaks sensitive data between AI clients and servers to ensure that AI systems only access the minimum amount of data they need to operate. Discover more at agentcloak.ai
As the old internet dies, polluted by low-quality AI-generated content, you can always find raw, pioneering, human-made thought leadership here. Thank you for helping me make this a leading publication in the field.
@Luiza Jarovsky, PhD a great interview and fascinating paper. As a therapist, someone trained in human rights law, and someone who has worked inside institutions from UNICEF to child welfare systems, I want to name what the paper misses: the body.
Hartzog and Silbey argue AI undermines expertise, short-circuits decisionmaking, and isolates humans. All three correct. But these aren't just institutional dynamics. They are nervous system events. Institutions don't just "think." They regulate. They set the physiological conditions under which people can tolerate complexity and stay present through the friction that adaptation requires.
When AI replaces friction with smoothness, it trains the nervous systems inside the institution to stop tolerating difficulty. Skill atrophy isn't just cognitive. It's somatic. The capacity to sit with ambiguity, hold a hard conversation without reaching for a clean answer, tolerate the silence after impact: these are built through the body, in relationship, over time.
The paper's strongest insight is that AI isolates humans by displacing connection. Clinically, what it displaces is co-regulation. We regulate each other's nervous systems through tone, rhythm, presence. AI simulates connection's content. It cannot provide co-regulation. Without it, the institutional container loses its capacity to hold the very contestation the authors identify as essential.
I've written about this in The Splitting Machine: AI and the Failure of Integration https://yauguru.substack.com/p/the-splitting-machine-ai-and-the?r=217mr3
and
The Attention Wound: What the Attention Economy Extracts and What the Body Cannot Surrender https://open.substack.com/pub/yauguru/p/the-attention-wound?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Good discussion with points raised that are not talked about often enough.