Ethan Mollick (Wharton) launches a consistency test aimed at frontier AI labs on LinkedIn: "we'll know labs truly believe in ASI when they dissolve their Forward Deployed Engineering teams". As long as humans are needed to integrate AI into client organizations, white-collar jobs are not threatened in the short term.
The debate with roon (OpenAI employee, influential voice of the accel circle on X): roon retorts that this is a hayekian problem. Reference to Hayek ("The Use of Knowledge in Society", 1945): useful information within an organization is tacit, distributed, contextual. Central intelligence, even superintelligent, does not automatically resolve information flows. roon says he is more optimistic about employment than the average lab precisely for this reason. Mollick concedes the hayekian point then turns the argument around: if AI is not self-adopting, then the lab prediction that "most white-collar jobs will be replaced by 2035" is contradicted by their own FDE teams. roon sums up the apparent agreement: "Gentle singularity" — the transition will be slow and mediated, not a fast takeoff. Sam Altman will later reuse this term in his essay The Gentle Singularity (June 2025).
The consensus in the comments (practitioners, consultants, researchers) converges on four points:
1. Technology is often the easy part. The real obstacle is internal politics, HR incentives, legacy systems, and above all the question "who is liable when it breaks?". 2. ASI can produce a perfect transformation plan and still get stuck on a VP who refuses to modify their Salesforce workflow. 3. Accenture (and consulting more broadly) survives because it sells contractual liability, not just competence. An AI cannot be sued. A firm can. 4. Most shared phrase: "Curing cancer might be easier than replacing Accenture" — a technical problem has clear success criteria; an organizational problem does not.
The structuring tension that Mollick formalizes: East Coast vs West Coast (epistemic, not geographic). East = slow, fragmented transformation, constrained by the jaggedness of capabilities and social complexity. West = fast, massive automation as soon as capabilities are sufficient.
Conclusion: labs sell ASI but hire consultants. This is either a logical contradiction, or — a more cynical view — a short-term revenue strategy that funds the long-term bet. Either way, their own FDE teams attest that AI is not (yet) self-adopting. The adoption bottleneck migrates from the technical to the organizational.