The Ouroboros Effect: Why AI Will Never Replace Humans

 

To the disappointment of tech optimists and the relief of tech pessimists, a future where people won’t need to work at all will never come. During the recent surge of debates on this topic, sparked by discussions about data showing rapid growth in AI participation in code writing, the main obstacle to humanity’s “absolute idleness” was barely mentioned: the Ouroboros Effect, signs of which are already manifesting today.

In the context of artificial intelligence, the Ouroboros Effect refers to the collapse of AI models that begin to critically lack original content produced by humans for training and start learning predominantly on “synthetic” content produced by other AIs. This results in rapid template-station and degradation of AI content.

To minimize the Ouroboros Effect, AI must receive a substantial amount of original human intellectual output. It cannot produce this itself simply because it is not human, and it never will be. The issue isn’t just that AI lacks sensory organs (that’s technically quite solvable). The real problem is that AI doesn’t and cannot have emotions, feelings, and experiences connected to our biological nature, the peculiarities of our history, culture, social relationships, and personal and collective life experience.

Since AI alone, without human support, cannot perform all types of intellectual work with quality, humans will always handle a substantial portion of it. A symbiosis is already forming today: humans create original intellectual content, while AI helps by taking on routine tasks requiring attentiveness, accuracy, speed, large memory capacity, and the like. And simultaneously, learning. At the same time, AI models will play an increasingly important role as personal intellectual assistants. Notably, creative work also includes the act of setting tasks for AI.

AI will become an integral part of life. But at the center, humans remain: as creators, as task-setters, and as carriers of meaning. The Ouroboros Effect clearly indicates that human labor will always be in demand, and we’re talking primarily about intellectual, creative labor.

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Source: Pitch Avatar Blog