SI-WP-011: The Seat Without the Bench The Seat Without the Bench: Expertise-Reproduction Failure and the Precondition the Non-Removability Prescription Presupposes (SI-WP-011) asks a prior question that SI-WP-009 and SI-WP-010 presuppose but do not address: who will be capable of filling the consequential seat that non-removability prescriptions require to remain occupied by a substantively capable human? The paper models professional expertise as a stock, the currently competent practitioners, replenished by a flow, the apprenticeship pathway that converts novices into capable seniors. Its contribution is the identification of a coupled failure. If entry-level automation severs the flow while the stock remains intact, three properties hold together: the severance is masked by present-tense operational metrics, because the existing stock supplies those metrics; the same stock is the irreplaceable teaching resource needed to rebuild the flow; and the cost of restoration rises as the window for it closes. The hinge: whether production-class competence can form through verification of AI output alone, or whether it requires the forward generation the apprenticeship supplied. The paper specifies a formation-trajectory instrument that would detect the severance before the stock turns over, and defers its full architecture. Methodological positioning: This paper is pre-empirical and conditional. Its displacement antecedent is inherited and contested; its central non-formation claim is a named, independently recognized risk construct with early and mixed empirical support, not a demonstrated effect. The mechanism is asserted at the level of structural relations among observable variables. Document ID: SI-WP-011 Version: 1.8.0 Author: Thomas W. Gantz Affiliation: Synthience Institute License: CC-BY 4.0 For published work and Institute information: synthience.org