CONCEPT
The Satisficing Threshold
The floating criterion of 'good enough' that bounded agents carry into any decision — adjusting upward as the cost of generating the next alternative falls, and rising in the AI age faster than the evaluative capacity that would police it.
The
satisficing threshold is the minimum standard of acceptability against which a
satisficing agent compares each alternative in a sequential search. It is not a fixed parameter. It adjusts dynamically to the cost of continued search: rising when alternatives are cheap and abundant, falling when they are expensive and scarce. This adaptive property is what makes satisficing rational under bounded conditions —
the threshold tracks the opportunity cost of stopping versus continuing. Every major technological transition that has reduced the cost of generating alternatives has shifted satisficing thresholds upward. AI represents a
phase transition: when the cost of generating the next alternative drops to near zero, the threshold rises without natural bound, eventually outpacing the bounded evaluative capacity that would determine whether the threshold has actually been met. The result is
the specific behavioral pattern of AI-augmented work — builders generating at machine speed, evaluating at human speed, and experiencing the gap
between the two