CONCEPT
Cognitive Carrying Capacity
The finite human resource base — cognitive, emotional, relational — on which the AI ecosystem depends, and which its reinforcing loops are consuming faster than it regenerates.
Every system operates within constraints. A rabbit population grows exponentially when grass is abundant, but the meadow has a finite quantity of grass; when population exceeds carrying capacity, the system overshoots, grass is consumed faster than it regenerates, and the population crashes. The carrying capacity of the AI ecosystem is not a physical resource but a human one: the cognitive, emotional, and relational capacity of the people who work within the system. The reinforcing loop is drawing on this capacity the way rabbits draw on grass, and the system is approaching overshoot because the loop is accelerating while human regeneration happens at biologically fixed rates.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The signs of overshoot are the signs the Berkeley researchers documented: burnout that manifests not as dramatic collapse but as progressive erosion — reduced empathy, flattened affect, quiet withdrawal of engagement that precedes visible symptoms by months or years. These are not individual failures of resilience. They are system-level indicators of a resource being