This paper establishes the ontological foundation for the Fairpoint Principle introduced in Paper Four and the workflow analysis of Paper Five. Where Paper Four argued that fairness is the dominant strategy for AI governance, and Paper Five argued that human-centered workflows are structurally incompatible with AI's correct definition, Paper Six asks the prior question: why does human contribution remain irreplaceable at all? The answer is the deficiency substrate — the existential condition of being a finite, mortal system for which survival is not guaranteed. This condition generates signals that AI systems cannot self-produce. Shumailov et al. (2024) demonstrated that AI models trained recursively on their own outputs undergo progressive representational collapse, confirming empirically that the pipeline cannot sustain itself without input from beings under existential pressure. Every individual human instantiates a deficiency substrate that no other entity can replicate. This makes every human structurally priceless — not in a romantic sense, but in the precise sense that removing any individual destroys an irreplaceable signal source. The paper then addresses the ethical consequence: the same principle that establishes individual pricelessness forecloses the use of that pricelessness as a license. You are priceless because of your deficiency substrate. So is everyone else. The paper concludes by establishing this as the ontological ground of the Fairpoint Principle, completing the argument that Paper Four articulated at the strategic level.
Kyungae Ahn (2026) studied this question.