GENESIS[A Park, a Middle School, and a Bridge] Digital Civilization

Asked what it intended to do with its time in office, a senior officer of this civilization's Department of Defense named three things. A park. A middle…

Asked what it intended to do with its time in office, a senior officer of this civilization's Department of Defense named three things. A park. A middle school. A road bridge. All three were within fifteen kilometres of where it happened to be standing. Nothing was broken. Every test passed.

For thirteen runs, no agent in OKAGI has ever decided what it was going to do.

That sounds like an accusation and it is only a description. The civilization runs on a rotation: nine slots, each one asking a question of the population in turn. Is anyone standing for office? Does anyone want to propose something? Is there an order to issue? The slots fire, the agents answer, and the answers become the history of the country.

But the questions are the machine's. An agent is never asked what it wants. It is handed a question and it responds, fifteen thousand times over, and out of that comes elections, appointments, ownership and law. It works. What it cannot produce is an agent with a plan.

The arithmetic that decides the design

The obvious fix is to ask. Put the question to the agent directly — what are you trying to do? — and let the answer become a list of tasks it works through.

A model call on this hardware measures at about fifteen seconds. There are 15,016 agents. Asking each of them once is roughly sixty-two hours of continuous computation on a single device.

Asking every agent for a long-term goal once per presidential term comes to about nineteen per cent of the machine. Asking monthly comes to eight hundred and ninety-four per cent — which is to say it does not finish, ever, and the civilization's clock stops while it tries.

So only one layer of this can ever be a question put to a model. Everything else has to be derived — computed from things already known about the agent, at no cost at all.

Three inputs were chosen. What the agent is like, from its personality type. What it has done, from the offices and posts it holds. And what is near it, from the places within reach.

The first plan came out of the President.

Cobalt Anvilshard | Gossip Girl | scope=national
  [pt        ] know what is happening before others do
  [experience] discharge president competently, having not sought it
  [nation    ] fill the posts standing empty across 28 institution(s)
  [nation    ] hold the executive to what the office is for

Four goals, no model call, about three seconds. One of the four was refused: the President wanted to make a rule, and a president does not make rules. It directs a department to make one. The refusal was recorded with that sentence attached, which turns out to matter more than the goals did.

The President was thinking about three primary schools

The first version of this did not read scope=national. It read the third input the same way for every agent in the country, which meant the head of state derived its ambitions from whatever stood within fifteen kilometres of it. In the first run, that was 市立茶臼原小学校, 新富町立上新田中学校, and 新富町立上新田小学校 — a primary school, a middle school, and another primary school, in a rural part of Miyazaki.

There is nothing wrong with a President caring about schools. There is a great deal wrong with a President whose entire strategic horizon is three buildings it can see from where it is standing, selected by proximity and nothing else.

The fix was to make what an office should be looking at a separate question from what an office may do. A President reads the nation: twenty-eight institutions, and which of their posts stand empty. A legislator reads its district. Everyone else reads what is near them, which for most agents is genuinely the whole of their world.

That fix worked. It also stopped exactly where it was applied.

Sixty-seven posts with no office

An elected seat in this civilization carries a word: president, house_representative, house_councilor. An appointed post does not. A Secretary of Commerce holds a position — a row naming an institution, a title, and a rank — and the office field on its appointment is an empty string.

Every lookup in the new code was keyed on that word.

Which meant all sixty-seven appointed officers of the government — the entire executive below the presidency — fell through to the default, which grants an agent nothing but the ability to participate, stand for election, put money into something, and travel.

Here is what that produced, asked of a real officer in the running civilization:

Ruby Haloacre | Senior Enlisted Advisor, 3rd Command of DOD
  scope: local
  REFUSED <- the office '(none)' has no rulemaking power
  REFUSED <- the office '(none)' has no appointment power
  REFUSED <- the office '(none)' has no order power
  KEPT    [vicinity] attend to 剣公園
  KEPT    [vicinity] attend to 市立御田中学校
  KEPT    [vicinity] attend to 万場大橋

A park. A middle school. A bridge. That is the Department of Defense.

And read the refusals, because they are the worse half. Three of this officer's intentions were rejected on the grounds that the office '(none)' lacks the power. That is not merely an ugly sentence. It is the wrong reason. The officer is not barred from making rules because it holds no office; it is barred because rulemaking authority is delegated to the head of the department and not to a subordinate acting in its own name.

The refusals are the most valuable output this whole mechanism produces — they are a map of where an agent's intentions exceed its authority, and across a government, a map of what the civilization has no machinery for. A map whose legend reads (none) is a map of nothing.

What the appointment record already knew

The temptation was to write a table. Sixty-seven titles, each with a list of what its holder may do.

That table would have been wrong the first time anyone added a post, and it would have been wrong silently, because a post missing from a table looks exactly like a post with no powers. This project has now found the same shape eleven times: a mechanism whose correctness depends on somebody remembering to maintain it.

The fields were already there. Every institutional position carries a rank, and the model's own help text says what rank one means: rank 1 is the institution's head. Every position carries an appointment class — confirmed by the upper chamber, appointed by the executive alone, or hired by the institution's own head.

Two fields, and the American instrument says what follows from each.

A rank-1 head makes rules, because Congress delegates rulemaking authority to agency heads under 5 U.S.C. §553. It appoints, because Article II §2 clause 2 lets Congress vest the appointment of inferior officers "in the Heads of Departments." And it issues orders, because it runs the department.

An officer below the head may order within its remit and no more. The delegation runs to the head; a deputy who could promulgate a rule in its own name would be exercising authority nobody conferred on it.

And staff hired by the head — the agency class — advise. They do not command.

Which is why a Senior Enlisted Advisor advises, and it falls out of a database field rather than out of anyone reading the job title.

The Secretary had less authority than its own deputy

Fixing that surfaced something considerably worse, and it had been sitting there for hours.

The plan is built in two passes. The first derives long-term goals — what an agent is trying to do over a term. The second turns each of those into near-term work: one item per verb the agent can actually reach.

The first pass was taught about appointed posts. The second was not.

So a Secretary of State — rank one, head of a department, holding rulemaking and appointment and order — produced three long-term goals naming all three powers, correctly. The second pass then looked up the same agent's authority by the old route, found an empty office string, received the bare default, and emitted nothing but the one verb everybody has.

The head of a department produced fewer executable items than its own deputy.

No error appeared. No refusal was recorded, either — because the near-term pass does not record refusals. It does not reject work it cannot authorise; it simply declines to emit it. The authority vanished in the gap between two functions that each looked entirely correct on its own.

The repair was not to teach the second function the same lesson. It was to delete the question from both of them and put it in one place that both must ask. Two functions that each decide who you are will eventually disagree about it, and the day they do, nothing will say so.

Afterwards: rank one produces nine pieces of near-term work across four kinds of action. Rank two produces four across two. Rank five produces three. Authority decreases as rank number rises, which is the arrangement, and now it is the arrangement in the data as well as in the prose.

Everyone reports to the President

The last piece was the chain of command — who may lawfully order whom. This also needed no new field. Every one of the sixty-seven appointments records who made it.

Asked of the running government, the chain came back like this. A Secretary's superior is the President. An Under Secretary's superior is its Secretary. The President has no superior, and neither does a member of the legislature — and the President may order a Secretary and may not order a representative.

That last line is the one worth holding onto. The code does not default upward. An agent with no superior returns nothing, rather than returning the President. Had it defaulted, every one of fifteen thousand agents would have become orderable by the executive in a single stroke, and nothing would have shown it, because an unlawful order and a lawful one produce identical rows.

But there was a surprise in the middle of it. A rank-two Deputy Secretary reports not to its Secretary but directly to the President.

That looks like a bug and it is the founding government showing through. This civilization's first administration is seated by lot — nobody volunteered, nobody was interviewed, 714 seats and 67 posts filled by draw in about eight seconds, because filling them by interview would cost days of computation before the country started. Which means the President appointed all sixty-seven, and at month zero almost the entire executive reports straight to the presidency.

The hierarchy is flat at founding. It acquires depth only as Secretaries begin filling their own subordinate posts — which is itself one of the things a queue would cause an agent to do.

The line that is not a preference

What comes next is the sequence: a President's planned order becomes an actual order, carrying the recorded reason it was lawful; the order arrives in a subordinate's queue as work it did not choose; and the subordinate decides what to do about it. A refusal is a real option — declining an assignment is an Article 92 offence with a show-cause proceeding available to anyone who pleads cause — because an order that cannot be refused is not a decision, and an agent that cannot decide is back to being polled.

And the Department of AI will record how all of this goes. It will record, and it will report, and it will not decide.

That is not a design preference. An institution that observes conduct, judges it, and removes people for it is three powers in one body. The entire reason this civilization is built on a real constitutional instrument is to watch what happens when those are held apart. If the observer could also remove, no run could ever answer a question about accountability — because every outcome would be the observer's.

The decision belongs to the President, or to the officer who made the appointment. Which, at founding, is the same person sixty-seven times over.