AI & Kessler Syndrome

There's a theory called Kessler syndrome.

The core idea is that when enough debris accumulates in orbit, it causes collisions, creating more collisions and the density builds up until getting anything out of Earth's atmosphere safely into space becomes nearly impossible.

It's not anyone's goal to achieve this; it's a side effect of shared space filling up while everyone keeps adding to it and nobody is keeping track.

Something similar may be happening to AI, only with information instead of metal debris.

The first models were trained on the internet at its most human. They had access to books, forums, blogs, genuine fresh perspectives, etc.

Now the internet is filling with AI-generated content with an oversupply of summaries of summaries, rewritten observations and synthetic takes that nobody wants to hear.

The output of last year's model, fed back in as training data for next year's, creates a vicious cycle.

Neither system was designed to fail.

Genuinely human experience is already becoming the rarest training data on the internet and it's getting harder to find.

Space junk traps rockets. Information junk traps the knowledge that comes after it. The cage that humans are not building on purpose.