CONCEPT
Overshoot
The ecological condition in which a system consumes its resource base faster than the base can regenerate — producing apparent abundance followed by structural collapse.
Overshoot occurs when a system's rate of consumption exceeds the rate at which its energy base can be replenished. The system's apparent vigor during the overshoot period — booming population, accelerating output, rising metrics — conceals the underlying depletion. The pattern is documented across hundreds of ecological systems, from lynx-hare dynamics in the Canadian boreal forest to fisheries collapses in every ocean basin. Applied to the AI economy, overshoot names what distinguishes sustainable maximum power from unsustainable extraction. The Berkeley study's findings — exhaustion, eroded empathy, diminished cognitive reserves — are overshoot signatures at the individual level. Rising data center demand against finite aquifer recharge is overshoot at the ecological level. Intellectual topsoil depletion is overshoot at the civilizational level.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction between maximum power and overshoot is Odum's most consequential refinement of Lotka's original principle. Maximum power is sustainable; overshoot is not. From inside the system, they look identical — the predator population booms, the organization ships features, the builder produces