Protected human incompetence sounds strange and is, the framework argues, necessary. Not every inefficient human process is wasted geometry: a neighborhood deliberating badly about its park, a family not outsourcing every judgment, a student allowed to struggle, a citizenry that sometimes reasons poorly — each is exercising a capacity that vanishes if it is never used. Because competence itself is part of geometry, a society that lets an AI perform every consequential cognitive act can lose the very capacity to participate, so some domains are kept human on purpose, even where the machine would decide better.
It is the individual-scale companion of the benevolent-governance program’s human competence reserves: preserving human capacity in medicine, law, governance, and infrastructure is not a claim that humans remain better, but insurance against a dependency so total that turning the system off stops being a real option. Preserved incompetence is how the ecology keeps the standing that comes from being able to do a thing, not merely to have it done well on one’s behalf.