Atrophy Trap
The Atrophy Trap is what happens when you stop doing your own thinking and rely entirely on a machine or a single expert to make decisions for you. Over time, you lose the ability to understand the work yourself, eventually becoming so dependent that you can no longer tell if the advice you are getting is actually any good.
The Atrophy Trap describes an organizational failure mode where permanent delegation of critical judgment to AI or a single 'bridge' role leads to a decline in internal competence. As teams offload cognitive tasks, they lose the evaluative capacity required to audit outputs, creating a dangerous dependency where the organization can no longer distinguish between high-quality and low-quality work.
The three-stage organisational decay from permanent delegation: cognitive offloading, then loss of evaluative power (leaders can no longer tell good advice from bad), then structural sclerosis (single-point dependency). Cohen and Levinthal's absorptive capacity withers when delegated; the corrective is distributed Minimum Viable Literacy, not a dedicated Translator. (C4AIL.)