CONCEPT
The AI Escalation Trap
The arms-race structure in which each worker's response to AI-enabled productivity raises the baseline, forcing further intensification in a cycle that drives toward carrying-capacity exhaustion.
Meadows identified the escalation trap as the structure in which two or more actors respond to each other's behavior in ways that intensify the condition that provoked the behavior. An arms race is the canonical instance. The productive addiction Edo Segal describes — the inability to stop building even when the building has shifted from satisfying to compulsive — maps precisely onto this structure. Individual intensification is rational within the trap; escape requires refusing to compete on the dimension the escalation is driving, which the system's incentive structure actively punishes.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The structure progresses through four stages. Initial state: a worker discovers AI tools dramatically increase productivity. The work is satisfying; capability expansion is genuine. Escalation: the worker does more. The tool makes more possible. The market rewards more. She takes on additional tasks, expands into adjacent domains, fills gaps between tasks. Standard shift: colleagues, competitors, and the organization observe the increased output. The bar rises.