A system can get sharper while the people inside it get quieter.
That is the limit of the Apollo Program. By Apollo, I mean the operator’s toolkit: go to the floor, name constraints, measure flow, remove waste, repeat. I believe in it. I helped roll out Lean Six Sigma during the Great Recession. It works, often spectacularly.
But on a night paving job, the real waste was not the idle trucks visible on the dashboard. The waste-creating decision had been made hours earlier, when uncertainty was high and over-ordering trucks was the only socially admissible way to protect production. Optimization could measure that waste. It could not make the uncertainty speakable.
That required Ritual Time: a protected space to study error while it was still cheap, and make it safe to be wrong in public. AI will give every company more Apollo. It will not teach them to metabolize meaning. Without that second capacity, you just get faster incoherence.