CONCEPT
Generalized Resistance Resources
The biological, material, cognitive, emotional, social, and cultural assets — economic security, social support, institutional anchoring, mentoring — that enable effective coping with stressors and that AI tools simultaneously provide and erode.
Generalized Resistance Resources (GRRs) are the assets an individual or community can deploy to cope with stressors of any kind. They include economic security, social support networks, cognitive flexibility, institutional belonging, cultural inheritance, and what Antonovsky called coherence literacy — the explicit understanding of one's own dispositional orientation. GRRs are generalized because they apply across stressor types: a person with strong social ties copes better with bereavement, illness, job loss, and now AI displacement. They build the Sense of Coherence over time, and they are deployed to maintain it under acute stress. The salutogenic claim about AI is that the democratization of capability documented in You On AI must be accompanied by a democratization of GRRs, or the technology will amplify existing inequalities rather than redress them.
In The You On AI Field Guide
GRRs are unequally distributed across populations, and the inequality is structural rather than incidental. The developer in San Francisco confronting the AI transition possesses GRRs —