> Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities.

There’s a modern phenomenon I’ve been thinking about but have struggled to put a name to.

Everything just becomes so generalized, streamlined that it becomes impossible to operate outside of the pre defined “happy path”.

AI will make this increase 100x as taking humans out of the loop seems to accelerate this process.

Perhaps the term "canalization" fits? Coined by C.H. Waddington, describing the process of forming a chreode in a homeorhetic system. But it doesn't really encompass the "everything becomes overly generalized" concept you mentioned. Rather, it's more about robustness against perturbation of a trajectory in a conceptual space. Christopher Alexander called them 'paths in configuration space'.