CONCEPT
Positive Feedback
The runaway dynamic in which a system's output feeds back as input and amplifies — the screech of the microphone, the cascade of hemorrhage, the grinding compulsion of the AI-augmented builder who cannot stop.
Positive feedback is the mirror image of negative feedback: the system's output, instead of being corrected, is amplified and fed back as input. The result is exponential acceleration toward a boundary — hardware distortion, physiological collapse, or the specific grey exhaustion of a human being caught in an optimization loop that has outrun her capacity for self-regulation. Wiener identified positive feedback as the signature failure mode of any powerful system without a governor. In biological systems it is rare and dangerous: the mechanism of anaphylaxis, of bleeding out. In human-machine systems it is the mechanism of burnout, compulsion, and the burnout society that Byung-Chul Han diagnoses and that Segal documents in You On AI as the inability to close the laptop even after the exhilaration has drained away.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The canonical illustration is the public address system: a microphone placed too close to a speaker picks up the speaker's output, the amplifier amplifies