# Mike Olsen

> Thinking about AI, professional accountability, and the future of technical work.

This file provides an LLM-friendly overview of the site content. For complete essay text, see: https://molsen.ca/llms-full.txt

## About This Site

Mike Olsen writes about AI governance, professional accountability, and the future of technical work. The core contribution is a framework for deploying AI in professional contexts: maximizing AI strengths while routing around its weaknesses.

## The Framework

The "Making AI Make Sense" framework addresses a central problem: AI is powerful but unreliable. Most approaches either ignore the unreliability and get burned, or avoid AI entirely and miss the value.

The framework's core move: ask AI to execute instructions, not provide answers. This shifts verification from checking answers (which requires expertise to produce them) to checking methods (which requires only expertise to understand them).

Key concepts:
- **Oracle vs Assistant modes**: Asking for answers vs asking for execution
- **Executable Knowledge Architecture (EKA)**: Expert specifies intent, AI translates to executable artifact, human verifies
- **Knowledge as capability**: Defining knowledge operationally as capability to produce outcomes
- **Agent-relative tacitness**: Tacitness as a property of transfer relationships, not intrinsic to knowledge
- **Tacit space shrinkage**: AI capabilities opening transfer paths that didn't exist before

## Essays

### Framework Essays (read in order)

### Making AI Make Sense
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/making-ai-make-sense/
- Type: hub
- Summary: Like fire, AI is powerful, dangerous, and essential. Here's how to cook with it.
### Knowledge as Capability: An Operational Foundation for Human-AI Cooperation
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/knowledge-as-capability/
- Type: foundational
- Tags: Epistemic Rigor
- Summary: Defining knowledge as capability to produce outcomes, the foundational claim that makes human-AI cooperation coherent.
### Agent-Relative Tacitness: A New Framework
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/agent-relative-tacitness/
- Type: theoretical
- Tags: Epistemic Rigor
- Summary: Rethinking what makes knowledge tacit or explicit, and why the answer depends on who is doing the knowing.
### Tacit Space Shrinkage: When AI Articulates the Inexpressible
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/tacit-space-shrinkage/
- Type: theoretical
- Tags: Epistemic Rigor, Organizational Change
- Summary: As AI capabilities expand, the domain of knowledge that organizations cannot express or operationalize is shrinking, with real implications for expertise and governance.
### AI as Oracle vs. Assistant: Two Patterns of Deployment
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/ai-oracle-vs-assistant/
- Type: foundational
- Tags: Epistemic Rigor, AI Governance
- Summary: The fundamental choice in how you use AI determines whether you can govern it. Oracle pattern creates verification problems. Assistant pattern solves them.
### The Strong Oracle Trap
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/strong-oracle-trap/
- Type: core
- Tags: Epistemic Rigor, AI Governance
- Summary: Thorough AI dialogue feels like it solves the verification problem. It doesn't. Understanding why requires seeing oracle pattern as a spectrum, and recognizing what tools can and cannot fix.
### Executable Knowledge Architecture
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/executable-knowledge-architecture/
- Type: core
- Tags: AI Governance, Organizational Change
- Summary: A framework for integrating AI into professional practice that preserves expertise, ensures reproducibility, and closes the governance gap between AI capabilities and organizational needs.
### Capability Governance: A Framework for Generated Artifacts
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/capability-governance/
- Type: core
- Tags: AI Governance, Professional Practice
- Summary: A framework for governing generated artifacts through defensibility. Two routes: exposed methodology or empirical track record. Obligations for producers, consumers, underwriters, and regulators.
### Agentic AI as Universal Interface
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/agentic-ai-universal-interface/
- Type: core
- Tags: AI Governance, Professional Practice
- Summary: Software is distilled expertise. Two barriers have prevented most expertise from becoming software: coding skill and system access knowledge. Agentic AI removes both.
### The Universal Interface Thesis
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/universal-interface-thesis/
- Type: core
- Tags: AI Governance, Organizational Change
- Summary: Code generation isn't just for knowledge work. It's the architecture for human interaction with any control surface—shop floors, building systems, medical devices, enterprise software. The implications restructure how we think about training, expertise, and vendor lock-in.
### Automating Expertise Gets Easier and Easier
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/automating-expertise-gets-easier/
- Type: core
- Tags: AI Governance, Professional Practice
- Summary: As agentic AI lowers the barriers, more expertise becomes software. What faces pressure, what remains, and where value moves.
### Ontology Generation
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/ontology-generation/
- Type: core
- Tags: AI Governance, Professional Practice
- Summary: When the AI tool is the universal interface, comprehensive logs reveal both what the organization does and what concepts it uses. Structure and procedure emerge together.
### What Benchmarks Aren't Measuring
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/what-benchmarks-arent-measuring/
- Type: core
- Tags: AI Governance, Professional Practice, Measurement
- Summary: GDPval and similar benchmarks test well-specified problems with verifiable answers. They don't—can't—test the ambiguous, contested, judgment-intensive work where professional expertise commands premiums. The measurement gap is structural, not temporary.
### AI-First Software: Engineering the Post-Interface Era
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/ai-first-software/
- Type: applied
- Tags: AI Governance
- Summary: Generative AI has solved language. That's enough to change software design—not in the future, but right now.
### The Return of the Assistant
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/return-of-the-assistant/
- Type: core
- Tags: AI Governance, Professional Practice, Organizational Change
- Summary: The DIY knowledge worker made sense for forty years. AI assistants offer something better: the freedom of DIY with the leverage of delegation.

### Standalone Essays
### The Office Availability Math
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/office-availability-math/
- Tags: Professional Practice, Organizational Change
- Summary: Two people in the same office are available to each other far less than you'd think. The math explains why DIY tools were liberating.


### Stochastic in Form, Deterministic in Function
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/llm-stochasticity-determinism/
- Tags: Epistemic Rigor, AI Governance
- Summary: 700 iterations across seven models. 25% accuracy asking directly. 100% accuracy asking for code. The gap tells you everything about how to use these tools.


### Mike's Rules for Critical Thinking
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/critical-thinking-rules/
- Tags: Epistemic Rigor, Professional Practice
- Summary: A working set of rules for critical thinking organized into three domains: foundation, analysis, and engagement. Written for non-academics who want a down-to-earth framework.


### Existential Threat to Consulting = Huge Opportunity
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/consulting-threat-opportunity/
- Tags: Organizational Change, Professional Practice
- Summary: How AI-encoded expertise disrupts consulting's traditional basis for premium fees, and what firms need to do about it.


### Evaluating AI Table Extraction: Claude vs Docling vs ScaleDP
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/ai-table-extraction-comparison/
- Tags: AI Governance
- Summary: A practical comparison of three table extraction approaches reveals surprising accuracy gaps that practitioners need to understand before selecting tools for document processing at scale.


### Parrots Are All You Need
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/parrots-are-all-you-need/
- Tags: AI Governance, Organizational Change
- Summary: Why generative AI will introduce greater change, faster, than the Internet itself—and what that means for knowledge workers.


### Leadership Lessons from Science Fiction
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/leadership-lessons-science-fiction/
- Tags: Organizational Change, Professional Practice
- Summary: The books that most shaped how I lead weren't management classics—they were science fiction novels I read in my youth.


### The Remote Work Formula
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/remote-work-formula/
- Tags: Organizational Change, Professional Practice
- Summary: Individual flexibility and autonomy matter. But so does group consideration. The formula isn't complicated.


### The Real Job of Support Teams in Professional Services
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/support-team-real-job/
- Tags: Organizational Change, Professional Practice
- Summary: Support teams exist to protect the scarcest resource in professional services: the time professionals spend not working.


### EKA in Practice
- URL: https://molsen.ca/writing/eka-in-practice/
- Tags: AI Governance, Professional Practice, Organizational Change
- Summary: The framework is no longer theoretical. Here's what we learned when we deployed it.



## How to Use This Content

1. **For framework understanding**: Start with "Making AI Make Sense" for the complete overview, then read individual essays for depth.

2. **For complete text**: Fetch https://molsen.ca/llms-full.txt which contains the full content of all essays.

3. **For specific essays**: Each essay URL above can be fetched directly.

## Contact

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikealolsen/
- Website: https://molsen.ca/