AI Recursion Vertigo
Concerns & RisksProvisional
A felt disorientation arising from working inside an AI-saturated ecosystem where the participant's own role involves designing or evaluating systems in which AI agents transact with other AI agents, producing a sense that the human-purposeful layer of work has been displaced into recursive automation loops. Distinct from synthetic-validation-recursion (which focuses on validation testing with synthetic personas) in that it captures the existential rather than methodological concern
Evidence
“Like I'm going crazy. So I'll explain why. Because I do contract work as a UX researcher. And right now I'm just running interviews for a company. Basically they're developing a niche AI chatbot for companies. The companies come to them, give them briefs of like "this is what we want to know about this market," and then we interview them, and then we feed the LLM all that information, that really niche information, and then we provide that chatbot for whatever company came to us. And so a lot of the times I'm doing interviews about the development of agentic AI and vector databases. It's like AI agents talking to AI agents. And I just start to feel like I'm going crazy because it's very Matrix-y, and then I realize when I'm emailing people, I'm like, man, it's just two AI bots talking to each other at this point.”
“And that feels, it's just like, this... I can imagine this is what my parents felt like during the discovery of the internet. Because it just feels like there's this whole world being created that's not real. And yeah, I don't know how to... I think about this a lot, but it's hard to explain.”