Add initial exploration history and draft INTENT.md

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

Assistant: claude-code
Assistant-Model: opus
Assistant-Process: 1494246@bnt-lap001
Assistant-Session: caf6de6f-f9e4-47ce-a584-49baa271fa4b

INTENT.md

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+# INTENT.md
+
+> **Status:** draft suggestion (2026-10-11), derived from `README.md` and
+> `history/20261011-InitialExploration.md`. To be reviewed and ratified by the
+> project owner.
+
+## Project
+
+`assembly-economics`
+
+## Purpose
+
+`assembly-economics` exists to develop an experimental economic framework for
+societies in which superhuman machine capability — physical, computational and
+increasingly cognitive — provides most of the leverage for innovation and
+profit.
+
+In such an economy, wage labour can no longer be the main way people take part
+in value creation and gain agency. The project explores a **post-work mechanism
+for participation and agency**. Its framing is that an economy is an *adaptive
+information processing network*: an assembly of information organisms, humans
+and institutions, linked by flows of information, resources and attention.
+
+It is the philosophical and economic framework that **coulomb.social** explores
+and builds on.
+
+## Core Intent
+
+Describe an economy as a living, evolvable information-processing system, and
+establish the concepts needed to design, govern and evaluate such systems so
+that:
+
+1. **Abundant machine resources are spent to preserve scarce sentient
+   resources.** Money, compute and machine capacity are convertible potential.
+   Human attention, autonomy and wellbeing are lived capacity. They can only be
+   allocated once and must be protected by viability boundaries, not optimised
+   away.
+2. **Humans keep purpose and authority.** Information organisms learn, predict
+   and act, but objectives, authority and hard constraints come from the human
+   and institutional environment and stay outside the optimisation loop.
+3. **Participation does not require labour.** Supplying objectives, judgment,
+   attention, consent and governance is treated as real economic contribution,
+   and it is valued accordingly.
+
+## Conceptual Pillars
+
+The initial exploration established six connected layers. Together they form
+the project's working vocabulary.
+
+### 1. Adaptive Information Processing Network (AIPN)
+
+A persistent, typed, token-flowing, self-modifying semantic network. Nodes are
+high-level business concepts (`DocumentType`, `EmployeeRole`,
+`WorkstationClass`, `Goal`, `Observer`). Activations are concrete instances
+(documents, people, materials). Observers emit multi-dimensional
+success/error signals against explicit and implicit goals. Learning changes
+future activation, prediction, utility and, eventually, the structure itself.
+
+> Semantic structure + activation + prediction + feedback + adaptation.
+> `sense → activate → predict → act → observe → learn → reorganize`
+
+Key distinctions: structure vs. activation, observation vs. evaluation,
+prediction vs. utility, learning vs. authority, viability before optimisation.
+
+### 2. Membrane
+
+The boundary between an organism and its environment, such as a company's
+governed IT landscape. It works through semantic projections (read models, not
+replicas), preserves identity, provenance and the original governance envelope,
+and is claim-oriented. It is bidirectional but asymmetrical. It filters the
+vast environment down to what the organism actually samples. It is layered
+(constitutional, operational, adaptive, ephemeral) and keeps negative space
+visible. Membrane configuration is the main control and deployment interface.
+
+### 3. Seed Kernel
+
+A minimal developmental substrate rather than a finished intelligence. It
+attaches to an information environment and grows by adapting to it. The
+environment feeds it objectives (prompts act more like hormones than
+nutrients) and resources (compute budget). Utility becomes endogenous,
+attention becomes resource allocation, and symbiosis is a better target than
+autonomy.
+
+### 4. Evolution
+
+Organisms as genotype/phenotype pairs that are bred, recombined and inherited
+across generations. Fitness is multi-dimensional and environment-based. There
+are nested adaptation loops (learning, development, evolution, ecosystem), and
+heritable membranes. Hard constraints remain outside evolutionary optimisation.
+
+### 5. Metabolism and Substrate
+
+Organisms run on substrate layers: information, compute as energy, runtime as
+habitat, memory as expensive tissue, authority and human attention as premium
+energy. Metabolic pathways, waste and excretion, starvation and abundance
+behaviour, and return on compute tie internal regulation to economic selection
+pressure.
+
+### 6. Resource Ontology and Attention Economics
+
+Resource *accounting* (money as generalised, convertible potential) is distinct
+from resource *ontology*. Resources are classed as commodity, capability, human
+and institutional, along with whether they are sentient. Human attention is
+treated as the reference scarce resource. Attention regulation becomes a
+central societal control loop:
+
+```text
+human purpose → objectives → economic allocation
+  → (money · compute · machine capacity) → information organisms
+  → work → abundance → human benefit → feedback
+protected throughout by: attention · autonomy · wellbeing viability boundaries
+```
+
+## Scope
+
+**In scope**
+
+- A conceptual canon (currently v0.1 in the history file) and its successors
+- Economic models for participation, agency and value attribution in a
+  post-work setting
+- Resource ontology, conversion functions and attention-protection mechanisms
+- Membrane and governance models for embedding information organisms in real
+  institutions
+- Reference scenarios (e.g. invoice processing) and minimal experimental
+  kernels that make the concepts testable
+- Framework input for coulomb.social
+
+**Out of scope (for now)**
+
+- Production implementations, storage engines, protocols or API formats.
+  Canon v0.1 deliberately leaves these unstandardised.
+- Concrete marketplace product features. Those belong in `coulomb-social`.
+- Pricing mechanics as such. See `adaptive-pricing`.
+
+## Guiding Principles
+
+- Semantic explicitness over opaque optimisation
+- Viability precedes optimisation, and sentient viability precedes all else
+- Learning is distinct from authority, and governance stays outside the network
+- Provenance and explainability are first-class
+- Keep the kernel small; separate the normative core from exploratory
+  extensions
+
+## Proposed Next Artifacts
+
+From canon v0.1 § 53, extended toward the economic layer:
+
+- `canon/ConceptualCanon.md`: extract and stabilise the v0.1 canon
+- `canon/NetworkObjectModel.md`: precise, implementation-neutral object model
+- `canon/MembraneModel.md`: the interface membrane and its layers
+- `canon/ResourceOntology.md`: resource classes, conversion functions,
+  sentient boundary
+- `canon/ParticipationModel.md`: post-work participation and agency
+- `research/ResearchProgram.md` and `research/ReferenceScenario-InvoiceProcessing.md`
+
+## Relationship to the Ecosystem
+
+- **coulomb.social**: primary consumer; this repo supplies its philosophical
+  and economic framework.
+- **adaptive-pricing / commerce-canon**: neighbouring economic mechanics that
+  may later adopt this repo's resource ontology.
+- **the-custodian / State Hub**: work coordination (domain `communication`,
+  topic `coulomb-social`).