The Last Gatekeepers
By Charlie G. Peterson IV | Greg Report Ai Predictions 2025
Why authority is dissolving as Ai removes friction from knowledge, judgment, and power
For most of modern history, power lived behind desks.
It sat inside law firms, newsrooms, universities, executive suites. It wore credentials and spoke in guarded language. If you wanted access, you waited. If you wanted authority, you earned it slowly, through institutions designed to ration knowledge and decision-making.
That era is ending. Not with a crash, but with a quiet loss of leverage.
Ai did not arrive waving flags. It slipped in sideways, answering questions too quickly, drafting documents too competently, reasoning without ceremony. The first shock was speed. The second was accuracy. The third was indifference to hierarchy.
Gatekeepers still exist, but the gates no longer matter.
Authority Without Permission
What made experts powerful was not intelligence. It was control of scarce inputs.
Lawyers controlled precedent. Doctors controlled diagnosis. Editors controlled distribution. Executives controlled planning. The rest of the world operated downstream, trusting that decisions had been filtered through experience and judgment.
Ai breaks that chain.
A mid-level analyst now runs scenarios that once required a strategy group. A solo founder drafts contracts that look uncomfortably close to firm-issued templates. A student interrogates primary sources without waiting for a syllabus. The outputs are not perfect, but perfection was never the real advantage.
Speed and breadth were.
Ai supplies both without asking who you are.
This aligns cleanly with one of the core Gregorian predictions: A World Without Experts. Not a world without knowledge, but a world where authority no longer depends on institutional blessing. Expertise becomes something you demonstrate, not something you claim.
The credential still hangs on the wall. The work happens elsewhere.
The Collapse of Soft Power
Institutions are not failing because they are wrong. They are failing because they are slow.
Risk committees hedge language. Compliance teams dilute clarity. Editorial processes soften conclusions. By the time an answer arrives, the moment has moved on.
Ai does not hedge. It responds.
That response may need review, context, or correction, but it arrives when the question is still alive. In competitive environments, timing often beats polish. The result is a shift in trust away from official channels and toward tools that keep pace with thought.
This is not rebellion. It is pragmatism.
When someone can test five hypotheses before an expert schedules a call, the expert loses gravity. The room rearranges itself around whoever can move fastest.
Gatekeeping relied on friction. Ai removes it.
The New Shape of Judgment
This is where the story gets uncomfortable.
If Ai replaces access to expertise, what happens to judgment?
The fear is that judgment disappears. The reality is more precise. Judgment moves.
Humans are no longer needed to retrieve information. They are needed to decide what matters. To frame the question. To recognize when an answer, however fluent, is wrong in spirit or misaligned with reality.
That is a harder job than memorization. It was never taught well because it was never scarce.
Now it is.
The professionals who survive this transition will not be the ones who defend their titles. They will be the ones who adapt their role from gatekeeper to interpreter, from authority to guide.
That shift echoes another Gregorian prediction: Ai will prove or disprove all our current theories. Not because Ai is wiser, but because it forces ideas to be tested continuously rather than protected by status.
Theories that survive scrutiny will endure. Titles will not.
When Institutions Lose Their Monopoly
Universities still educate. Media still reports. Governments still regulate.
But none of them control the narrative alone.
Ai flattens distribution. It dissolves the advantage of scale. A single well-armed individual now competes with departments. A small team challenges an agency. A citizen audits policy claims in real time.
This does not guarantee better outcomes. It guarantees different power dynamics.
We are watching the early stages of a broader prediction playing out: Ai is Everywhere. Not as a product, but as infrastructure. Invisible, assumed, always present. Like electricity, but argumentative.
Once infrastructure becomes ambient, resistance looks quaint.
The Human Role After the Gate
The last gatekeepers will not fall dramatically. They will fade.
Their emails will go unanswered. Their memos will circulate less widely. Their warnings will sound abstract next to concrete outputs produced elsewhere.
Some will adapt. Many will not.
The winners in this next phase will be people who understand that authority is no longer granted upstream. It is earned in motion. By clarity, by speed, by the ability to synthesize rather than hoard.
Ai does not eliminate human relevance. It exposes where relevance was borrowed rather than built.
That may be the most honest reset we have seen in decades.
Epilog
This piece was inspired by a recent long-form conversation that captured the underlying tension of this moment: institutions sensing their grip loosen, while tools accelerate past them without apology. The discussion did not create the shift. It simply named it.
The gates are still standing.
People are just walking around them.
Applicable Gregorian Prediction Highlighted:
A World Without Experts
Status: In process. Authority is detaching from institutions and reattaching to demonstrated capability, assisted by Ai.