assembly-economics/INTENT.md

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:

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).