I think that it's a bit more nuanced than that. I think that we end up with bureaucracy because goals are not aligned across silos (divisions, time, etc.) and the systems that are implemented to achieve those goals overlap and create redundancies and inefficiencies.
I disagree. Bureaucracy is inherently a job of managing people, in all their imperfect emotional people-like glory. Bureaucrats don't just put numbers into a spreadsheet and get out an answer, they balance the needs and wants of competing stakeholders to allow society to function effectively a collective.
I'm not sure that's a good description, either. Each bureaucracy has an "owner" - the person (or group of people) who decides how it should work. Bureaucracies that have an owner are highly functional, and we don't normally notice them. We notice, however, abandoned bureaucracies, where nobody even knows why and how this particular bureaucracy was designed and can't change it in response to the changing environment. That's where bureaucratic organizations start resembling kind of intelligent (yet stupid) organisms whose goals are not necessarily aligned with ours, but we have to live in the same world with them.
It's a refreshing thought to think about organisations as living creatures with their own "brain" and agenda. We are kinda so used to living among them. Perhaps living alongside AGI systems would not be drastically different from this experience.
The main reason why organizations evolve to a bureaucratic mess is human agency, in particular the fact that each individual has personal interests and is motivated to achieve their personal goals. Bureaucracy is designed to restrict personal initiatives that favour the individual worker at the expense of the organization. For example, in Greece public sector workers abuse their position by expecting grafts to do their job, and they deny service to those who don't pay by giving a higher priority to everyone else. Thus, rules are put in place to restrict how prioritization is handled by public sector workers to mitigate this problem. Yet, now public sector workers are bounded to a rigid set of rules which dictates how and when a process should be processed.
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