Effort-Signal Decoupling

For three hundred thousand years, the formal properties of making special—the exaggerated pitch of motherese, the chip-carved handle of the courting spoon, the intertwined ornament around a medieval capital letter—were reliable signals of human investment precisely because they could only be produced through effort. The elaboration was expensive. The cost guaranteed the honesty of the signal: you could not produce the formal properties without paying the metabolic, temporal, and attentional price. The human perceptual system, calibrated over hundreds of millennia to use formal elaboration as a proxy for human care, could trust the correlation. Ellen Dissanayake’s framework predicts that when AI severs this correlation—when the formal properties can be produced in seconds without any investment—the signal degrades in exactly the way any costly signal degrades when its cost is removed. The peacock’s tail signals genetic fitness because it is metabolically expensive to grow; if it could be grown without cost, it would cease to signal anything.