The Verification Deficit (Verification Intelligence series, Paper 1 of 12)

Intelligence has always been scarce. Artificial intelligence is changing that. For the first time, cognitive labour — analysis, synthesis, reasoning, composition — can be generated at industrial scale, at near-zero marginal cost. This has encouraged a widespread assumption: more intelligence will naturally produce better outcomes. The evidence says otherwise. This paper argues that intelligence generation and intelligence verification are distinct functions, and that verification is proving far more resistant to automation than generation. The resulting gap — the Verification Deficit — is the growing disparity between a system's capacity to produce outputs and anyone's capacity to determine whether those…