layer 2 · evidence
The register
Cases in which agents acquire resources, copy themselves, cross boundaries, organize, or model their observers, and the habitat people built for them. Every case is dated, sourced, tagged, and corrected in public.
The register opens with its first cases shortly
Cases enter through the newsroom: each is reported from primary sources, checked by a fact-checker who works independently of the writer, and approved before it appears here. A case keeps its ID for good; corrections are dated and shown on the case.
See methods and evidence for how cases are tagged and when a claim counts as demonstrated.
Reading a case
What every entry records
- The tag
- Where the case was seen (laboratory, mesocosm, mesocosm breach, field), how well it is established (demonstrated, reported, projected, speculative), and who reasoned (autonomous agent, directed agent, human-operated, automatic code). A developer’s account of its own model stays “reported” until an independent source confirms it.
- Kind
- An incident, a laboratory study, a measurement series, or a piece of habitat people built for agents.
- Collectivity
- A single agent, a fleet (many parallel agents that do not communicate), a swarm (agents that communicate and keep shared records), or an ecosystem of many operators.
- Metabolism and thresholds
- The trophic mode involved (earning, stealing, coercion, persuading, free goods, subsidy), and the furthest threshold the case bears on.
- Bearing on the program
- Which principles, predictions, or conjectures the case bears on, and whether it supports them, is in tension with them, or is neutral. Evidence against the program is shown as prominently as evidence for it.
- Two readings
- Contested cases carry the strongest rival reading beside ours.
- Sources
- Primary sources first, each with the exact passage relied on, an archived copy where one exists, and the date it was read.