This is playing out in real time with AI. Someone uses ChatGPT to compress weeks of work into hours, and the organizational response isn't "great, let's scale this" -- it's panic about what it means for headcount and hierarchy.

There's a short film making the rounds that captures this perfectly -- an employee uses AI to generate the quarterly results his whole department was working on, and instead of being promoted, he gets fired: https://youtu.be/O5FFkHUdKyE

The simplicity penalty is even worse when the simplification comes from AI. It's not just "you made us look bad" -- it's "you made our entire team look unnecessary."