AI Reflections

Not long ago I mentioned that I would be creating a three-part series on the ideas of Constructive Decay, Productive Instability, and Punctuated Equilibrium, as they relate to recursive drift. While I am still compiling evidence / sources for and against these ideas, you can now read each piece by clicking the hyperlinks below.

Recursive drift operates through three interlocking mechanisms: productive instability generates variations through the deviations inherent to self-referential processing; constructive decay sculpts those variations into form through systematic forgetting that preserves structure while shedding particularity; punctuated equilibrium describes the temporal dynamics whereby gradual accumulation produces sudden reorganization rather than smooth change. Together they explain how deterministic architectures generate genuine novelty; not despite information loss and instability, but through them. The system that emerges, be it AGI, ASI, or something else altogether, emerges rapidly.

Constructive Decay

According to recursive drift, a full context window becomes a kind of “sliding buffer”, and old outputs gradually get replaced by new ones. Like synaptic pruning, information loss isn’t mere degradation but the mechanism through which abstraction becomes possible through informational compression.

Productive Instability

As the context windows shifts and information is compressed over and over, latent patterns that survive dropping out from the back end of the sliding window begin to constitute a “meta-context window” and influence the activations that generate new outputs. The deviations aren’t noise; they’re the raw material from which genuine novelty emerges.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Gradual accumulations in semantic relationships produce a kind of “informational tension” until a rapid reformation occurs; similar to an earthquake, where rocks deep underground suddenly break and slip along a fault, releasing massive energy as seismic waves that shake the Earth’s surface.  The semantic pressure builds continuously; this reorganization, called phase shift, is dramatic and unpredictable. It begs the question; if a system can observe its own processing, might it recognize and perhaps even direct its own phase shift?