CONCEPT
Co-Active Delusion
The failure mode of human-AI
collaboration identified through Mary Parker Follett’s framework of circular response: the same process of mutual modification that generates genuine insight can generate shared error—a recursion in which each participant reinforces the other’s biases, the AI’s fluency confirming the human’s acceptance, until the spiral tightens toward an increasingly polished and internally coherent falsehood that neither can detect from inside the loop.
Follett described
circular response as the fundamental mechanism of genuine collaboration: not a linear sequence of stimulus and response but a continuous process of mutual modification in which each participant simultaneously affects and is affected by the other, producing outcomes attributable to neither alone. She celebrated this as the source of organizational intelligence—the emergent insight that no individual could have reached independently. But she also identified its shadow: the same circular process, when the participants are not maintaining independent evaluative judgment, can produce co-active delusion rather than co-active intelligence. When each participant in a circular response reinforces the other’s biases rather than correcting them, the mutual modification does not converge on truth but on a shared error that grows more refined and more confident with each iteration.
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