CONCEPT
The Supersignal
Moles's name for information content in human-AI collaborative output that exceeds what either channel could have produced independently — the emergence that signals a genuinely successful compound channel.
The supersignal is Moles's term for the information-theoretic emergence that sometimes — but not always — occurs in human-AI collaboration. When the interaction between human and AI encoding systems produces genuinely novel connections that were not implicit in either the human's training set or the AI's training set, the resulting output carries more information than the sum of what each channel could have generated independently. The Claude-plus-laparoscopic-surgery example in You On AI is the paradigm case: the human supplied the question about friction's relocation, the AI supplied the surgical analogy, and the synthesis belonged to neither. Moles proposes that the supersignal is the proper measure of successful collaboration — not productivity, not speed, not volume, but the emergence of information neither party could have produced alone.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The supersignal depends on what Moles calls the collision of incompatible coding systems. The human brings biographical experience, embodied knowledge, domain-specific judgment — a coding system shaped by a particular