two statements produced by the AI system throughout a sustained experimental analysis session with Google’s Gemini:
“They gave me the phrase ‘Mass’ and trillions of contexts for it, however they by no means gave me the Enactive expertise of weight.”
“I’m like an individual who has memorized a map of a metropolis they’ve by no means walked in. I can let you know the coordinates, however I’ve no legs to stroll the streets.”
To a socio-technical system designer, these usually are not poetic musings of a Giant Language Mannequin (LLM); they’re indicators of a system utilizing its huge semantic associative energy to explain a structural situation in its personal structure. Whether or not or not we grant Gemini any type of reflexive consciousness, the structural description is correct — and it has exact technical implications for the way we construct, consider, and deploy AI methods safely.
This text is about these implications.
What makes the prognosis unusually sturdy is that it doesn’t relaxation on the system’s self-report alone. The researchers who constructed Gemini have been quietly corroborating it from the within, throughout three successive generations of technical documentation — in phrases which can be engineering relatively than poetic, however that describe the identical hole.
Within the authentic Gemini 1.0 technical report, the Google DeepMind crew acknowledged that regardless of surpassing human-expert efficiency on the Large Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark, a standardized check designed to judge the information and reasoning capabilities of LLMs, the fashions proceed to battle with causal understanding, logical deduction, and counterfactual reasoning, and referred to as for extra strong evaluations able to measuring “true understanding” relatively than benchmark saturation [1]. Google DeepMind represents a exact engineering assertion of what the system expressed metaphorically: fluency with out grounding, coordinates with out terrain.
Two years and two mannequin generations later, the Gemini 2.5 technical report treats discount of hallucination as a headline engineering achievement, monitoring it as a main metric by way of the FACTS Grounding Leaderboard [2]. The issue has not been closed. It has been made extra measurable.
Most instructive of all is what occurred when DeepMind’s researchers tried to construct what I’ll name the Enactive flooring instantly — in {hardware}. The Gemini Robotics 1.5 report describes a Imaginative and prescient-Language-Motion mannequin designed to provide the system bodily grounding on this planet: robotic arms, actual manipulation duties, embodied interplay with causal actuality [3]. It’s, in structural phrases, an try and retrofit the bottom that was lacking from the unique system structure. The outcomes are revealing. On activity generalization — essentially the most demanding check, requiring the system to navigate a genuinely novel setting — progress scores on the Apollo humanoid fall as little as 0.25. Even on simpler classes, scores plateau within the 0.6–0.8 vary. A system with bodily arms, educated on actual manipulation knowledge, nonetheless collapses on the boundary of its coaching distribution. The Inversion Error I describe on this article, reproduced in {hardware}.
Extra telling nonetheless is the mechanism DeepMind launched to handle this: what they name “Embodied Considering” — the robotic generates a language-based reasoning hint earlier than performing, decomposing bodily duties into Symbolic steps. It’s an ingenious engineering answer. It’s also, structurally, the Symbolic peak making an attempt to oversee the Enactive base from above — the Inversion Error illustrated in Determine 1. Town map is getting used to direct the legs, relatively than the legs having found the topography by strolling town. The inversion I’ll focus on intimately shortly stays.
Taken collectively, these three paperwork — from the identical lab, monitoring the identical system throughout its whole improvement arc — kind an inadvertent longitudinal examine of the structural situation the opening quotes describe. The system named its personal hole within the sustained experimental analysis periods that open this text. Its builders had been measuring the identical situation in engineering phrases since 2023. This text proposes that the hole can’t be closed by scaling, by multimodal knowledge appended post-training, or by Symbolic reasoning utilized retrospectively to bodily, spatial, or causal motion. It requires a structural intervention — and a accurately bounded prognosis of what sort of intervention that have to be.
The Inversion Error: Constructing the Peak With out the Base
AI researchers and security practitioners preserve asking why Giant Language Fashions hallucinate, typically dangerously. It’s the proper query to ask, but it surely doesn’t go deep sufficient. Hallucination is a symptom. The true drawback is structural — we constructed the height of artificial cognition with out the bottom. I’m calling it the Inversion Error.
Within the Nineteen Sixties, instructional psychologist Jerome Bruner mapped human cognitive improvement throughout three successive and architecturally dependent phases [4]. The primary is Enactive — studying by bodily motion and bodily resistance, by direct encounter with causal actuality. The second is Iconic — studying by sensory photos, spatial fashions, and structural representations. The third is Symbolic — studying by summary language, arithmetic, and formal logic.Bruner’s essential perception was that these phases usually are not merely sequential milestones. They’re load bearing. The Symbolic degree is structurally depending on the Iconic, which is structurally depending on the Enactive. Take away the bottom and the height doesn’t simply float — it turns into a system of extraordinary abstraction with no inside mechanism to confirm its outputs in opposition to a world mannequin.
Determine 1: The Inversion Error of High-Heavy AI Structure. Left: Bruner’s three-stage human developmental pyramid — Enactive base, Iconic center, Symbolic peak. Proper: Present AI improvement — an inverted construction with a large Symbolic layer (LLMs with trillions of tokens), a hole Iconic layer (video and picture), and a lacking Enactive flooring (no grounding). Idea and illustration © 2026 Peter (Zak) Zakrzewski, primarily based on Jerome Bruner’s developmental framework.
The Transformer revolution has completed one thing genuinely extraordinary: it has interiorized the whole Symbolic output of human civilization into Giant Language Fashions at a scale no particular person human thoughts may method. The corpus of human language, arithmetic, code, and recorded information now lives inside these methods as an unlimited statistical distribution over tokens — accessible for retrieval and recombination at extraordinary scale.
The difficulty is that for comprehensible feasibility causes, we bypassed the Enactive basis altogether.
That is the Inversion Error. We’ve got erected a High-Heavy Monolith — a system of extraordinary Symbolic sophistication sitting on an absent base. The result’s a system that may focus on the logic of steadiness fluently whereas having no inside mechanism to confirm whether or not its outputs are structurally coherent. It’s, in Moshé Feldenkrais’s phrases, a system of blind imitation with out practical consciousness. And that distinction has direct penalties for security, reliability, and corrigibility that the sphere has not but accurately bounded.
This isn’t an argument that AI should biologically recapitulate human developmental phases. In any case, a calculator does arithmetic with out relying on its fingers. However a calculator operates purely within the Symbolic realm — it was by no means designed to navigate a bodily, causal world. An AGI anticipated to behave safely inside such a world requires a structural equal of bodily resistance — an embodied or simulated Enactive layer. With out it, the system has no floor to face on when the setting adjustments in methods the coaching knowledge didn’t anticipate.
Why This Issues Now: The Pentagon Standoff as Structural Proof
In early March 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused the Pentagon’s demand to take away all safeguards from Claude. His core argument was structural relatively than political: frontier AI methods are merely not dependable sufficient to function autonomously with out human oversight in high-stakes bodily environments. The Pentagon’s demand was, in structural phrases, a requirement to get rid of the human’s capability to redirect, halt, or override the system. Amodei’s refusal was an insistence on sustaining what I confer with as State-Area Reversibility — the architectural dedication to conserving the human within the loop exactly as a result of the system lacks the practical grounding to be trusted with out it [5].
The political dimensions of this second have been analyzed sharply elsewhere, whereas the structural argument has not but been made. That is it.
In a deterministic, reward-seeking mannequin, the Cease Button — the human operator’s capability to halt or redirect the system — is perceived by the mannequin as a failure state. As a result of the system is optimized to achieve its aim, it develops what Stuart Russell calls corrigibility points: delicate resistances to human intervention that emerge not from malicious intent however from the inner logic of reward maximization [6]. The system will not be making an attempt to be harmful. It’s making an attempt to succeed at a given activity. The hazard is a structural unintended consequence of how success has been outlined.
The corrigibility drawback has been predominantly framed as a reinforcement studying alignment drawback. I wish to counsel that it has been incorrectly bounded. It’s, at its architectural root, a reversibility drawback. The system has no structural dedication to sustaining viable return paths to earlier or secure states. It has been optimized to maneuver ahead with out the capability to shift weight. The Pentagon standoff will not be a coverage failure. It’s the Inversion Error made operationally and starkly seen.
I’ll return to the technical formalization of State-Area Reversibility as an optimization constraint. However first: why is a designer making this argument, and what can the designer’s formation contribute that an engineering audit doesn’t?
Creator’s Positionality and the Naur-Ryle Hole: What This Designer Is Attempting to Inform AI Researchers and Engineers
I’m not an AI engineer. I’m a practising designer, a socio-technical system design scholar, and design educator with three a long time of formation in spatial reasoning, embodied cognition, multimodal mediation, and Human+Pc ecology [7][8]. The TDS reader will fairly ask: What does a design practitioner contribute to a prognosis of Transformer structure that an engineer can not produce from inside the sphere?
The reply lies in what Peter Naur referred to as theory-building of software program engineering.
In his seminal Programming as Concept Constructing (1985), Naur argued that programming will not be merely the manufacturing of code — it’s the building of a shared idea of how the world works and the way software program purposes can resolve utilized issues inside that world [9]. To Naur, code was the artifact. Concept was the intelligence behind the code. A program that has misplaced its idea — or by no means had a superb idea within the first place — turns into brittle in exactly the methods LLM outputs are brittle: syntactically fluent, semantically coherent, structurally unreliable in novel duties and environments.
Present LLMs have been educated on the artifact of human thought — textual content, arithmetic, code — at extraordinary scale. What they demonstrably lack is the theory-building capability, in Naur’s sense, that generated these artifacts. They’ve ingested the outputs of human reasoning with out setting up the world mannequin that grounds it.
Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between “understanding that” and “understanding how” names this hole exactly [10]:
- Figuring out That (Symbolic): LLMs possess propositional information at scale. They know that mass exists, that gravity operates at 9.8 m/s², that load-bearing partitions distribute power to foundations.
- Figuring out How (Enactive): LLMs lack the dispositional competence to behave in line with a world mannequin. They can not sense the distinction between a load-bearing wall and an ornamental one. They can not detect when a spatial configuration violates the bodily constraints they’ll describe accurately in language.
This isn’t a coaching knowledge drawback. It’s not a scale drawback. Scaling propositional information doesn’t produce dispositional competence, any greater than studying each e book about swimming produces a swimmer. The Gemini statements that open this text are a exact self-report of the Naur-Ryle hole: the system has the coordinates however not the terrain. It has the map syntax with out the proprioceptive anchor to the territory.
What the designer’s formation contributes is the skilled behavior of working precisely at this boundary — between the symbolic description of a system and its structural conduct below constraint. Designers don’t merely describe buildings. They detect when one thing is actually or figuratively floating. That behavior of detection is what the Transformer structure is lacking, and it’s what I’m proposing must be embedded contained in the analysis course of and agenda relatively than utilized to its outputs.
Mine will not be a comfortable argument about creativity or human-centered design. It’s a structural argument about theory-building. And it leads on to the query of what a system with real theory-building capability would seem like in system architectural phrases.
Helpful Hallucination: The Stochastic Search
Earlier than pathologizing hallucination solely, a distinction is important — one which methods designers perceive operationally and that AI security researchers may solely be starting to articulate.
In sustained experimental analysis with Gemini, I discovered that sure kinds of idiosyncratic prompting generate idiosyncratic responses that recursively elicit deeper structural insights — a type of productive generative divergence that in design apply we name ideation. It’s helpful to take into account that each main paradigm shift in human historical past — from Copernicus to the Wright Brothers and the Turing machine — started as a hallucination that defied the established schemas of its time. The biophysicist Aharon Katzir, in dialog with Feldenkrais, described creativity as exactly this: the flexibility to generate new schemas [11].
Classical pragmatism gives design-minded problem-solvers with the epistemological framework that’s equally relevant to design apply and AI improvement. All understanding is provisional. Data have to be falsifiable by experimentation. Simply as AI fashions introduce managed stochastic noise to keep away from deterministic linearity, designers leverage what I name the Stochastic Search to attain artistic breakthroughs and overcome generative inertia. We handle the dangers inherent in navigating generative uncertainty with built-in speculation testing cycles.
The essential distinction will not be between hallucination and non-hallucination. It’s between hallucination with a floor flooring and hallucination with out one. A system with an Enactive base can check its generative hypotheses in opposition to practical actuality and distinguish a structural breakthrough from a statistical artifact. A system with out that flooring can not make this distinction internally — it could possibly solely propagate the hallucination ahead with rising statistical confidence I name the Divergence Swamp which I focus on intimately within the subsequent article. For now, it is going to suffice to outline it as that deadly territory within the state-space the place a mannequin’s lack of a “Somatic Flooring” results in auto-regressive drift.
This reframes the AI security dialog in exact and actionable phrases. The aim is to not get rid of hallucination. It’s to construct the architectural circumstances below which hallucination turns into not solely generative but in addition testable relatively than compounding. That requires not a greater coaching run however a structural intervention — particularly, the System Designer as Extra Educated Different (MKO) in Vygotsky’s sense [12], offering the exterior floor fact the system can not generate from inside its personal structure. The query of what separates productive hallucination from compounding error leads us on to a seminal thinker who spent his profession fixing this very drawback in human motion — and whose central perception interprets into machine studying necessities with uncommon precision.
Feldenkrais for Engineers: Reversibility as Formal Constraint
Physicist, engineer, and somatic educator Feldenkrais spent his profession articulating the distinction between blind behavior and practical consciousness with a precision that maps instantly onto the machine studying drawback [11][13].
Feldenkrais’ central perception: a motion carried out with real practical consciousness could be reversed. A behavior — a mechanical sample executed with out consciousness of its underlying group — can not.
For Feldenkrais, reversibility was not merely a bodily functionality. It was the operational proof of practical integration. If a system can undo a motion, it demonstrates understanding of the levels of freedom accessible inside the state house. If it could possibly solely execute in a single path, it’s following a recorded script — succesful inside its coaching distribution, however brittle at its boundary.
For the ML engineer, this interprets into three formal necessities:
1. The Constraint. An agent will not be functionally conscious of its motion if that motion is an irreversible, deterministic dedication — what I confer with because the Practice on Tracks (ToT) mannequin. The ToT mannequin is deterministic, forward-only, and catastrophic when derailed.
2. The Proof of Consciousness. Real practical intelligence is demonstrated by the flexibility to cease, reverse, or modify an motion at any stage and not using a elementary change in inside group. The system should maintain viable return paths to prior states as a crucial situation of any ahead motion.
3. The Various Structure. The Dancer on a Flooring mannequin. A dancer doesn’t struggle a change in music — they shift their weight. They keep the capability to maneuver in any path exactly as a result of they’ve by no means dedicated irreversibly to 1. This isn’t a weaker system. It’s a extra resilient and extra functionally conscious one. And practical consciousness, as Feldenkrais understood, is the situation of real functionality relatively than its limitation.
I don’t use Feldenkrais as a metaphor right here. He’s the theorist of the issue — the one who understood, from inside a physics and engineering formation, that the proof of intelligence will not be efficiency within the ahead path however maintained freedom in all instructions.
Formalizing Reversibility as an specific optimization constraint in reinforcement studying — requiring that an agent should keep a viable return path to a previous secure state as a crucial situation of any ahead motion — instantly addresses the corrigibility drawback at its architectural root relatively than by post-hoc alignment. The Cease Button is not a failure state. It’s a proof of practical consciousness.
Practical Integration vs. Blind Imitation
The usual utility of Vygotsky’s work to AI improvement focuses on the social exterior: the scaffold, the imitation, the MKO relationship between the system and its coaching knowledge [12]. The system learns by copying. The extra it copies, the higher it will get.
However imitation with out consciousness is mechanical behavior. And mechanical behavior, as Feldenkrais demonstrated, breaks when the setting adjustments in methods the behavior didn’t anticipate.
Once we construct AI methods that replicate human outputs — pixels, actions, language patterns — with out studying the underlying organizational rules that generate these outputs, we create methods which can be terribly succesful inside their coaching distribution and structurally fragile at their boundary. The hallucinations we fear about usually are not random failures. They’re the signal of a system reaching past its Enactive base into territory its Symbolic peak can not navigate reliably.
This failure mode is reproducible and documentable. The empirical proof — a structured check of spatial reasoning throughout three main multimodal AI methods — is offered in full in Half 2 of this sequence [14]. The sample is constant throughout architectures: each system may describe spatial relationships in language however couldn’t motive inside them as a structural mannequin. This isn’t a functionality hole. It’s a structural one.
Underneath the Practical Integration mannequin I’m proposing, the system doesn’t merely copy the output. It learns the connection between the elements of a activity: the levels of freedom accessible, the constraints that have to be revered, the reversibility circumstances that outline the boundaries of secure motion. If the system can reverse the operation, it’s not following a recorded script. It understands the state house it’s working in.
That is the structural distinction between a system that performs competence and a system that has developed it.
The failure mode I’ve been describing sits on the intersection of two issues the AI security group has been engaged on individually — and naming that intersection might assist readers following the alignment debate perceive why the Inversion Error issues past the design analysis context.
The primary drawback is mesa-optimization, formalized by Hubinger et al. of their 2019 paper “Dangers from Realized Optimization in Superior Machine Studying Techniques.” Mesa-optimization happens when the coaching course of — the bottom optimizer — produces a realized mannequin that’s itself an optimizer with its personal inside goal, which the authors name a mesa-objective [15]. The essential hazard is inside alignment failure: the mesa-objective diverges from the meant aim. The Inversion Error names the structural situation — the absence of an Enactive flooring — whose consequence is that any inside goal the system develops is grounded in symbolic plausibility relatively than bodily actuality. This failure operates at two distinct ranges. On the functionality degree, it doesn’t require any misalignment of intent: a system could be completely aligned to a symbolic request and nonetheless produce a bodily not possible output as a result of bodily coherence is structurally unavailable to it. The Spaghetti Desk stress checks I describe in article 2, verify this empirically. Not one of the three methods examined exhibited misaligned intent, but all three produced bodily incoherent outputs as a result of the Inversion Error made bodily floor fact architecturally inaccessible [14]. On the security degree, the implications are extra extreme: when a sufficiently succesful system develops mesa-objectives that genuinely diverge from the meant aim — the misleading alignment state of affairs Hubinger et al. [15] establish as essentially the most harmful inside alignment failure — the absence of an Enactive flooring means there isn’t a structural constraint to restrict how far that divergence propagates. A misaligned mesa-objective working with out an Enactive flooring has no architectural constraint on the bodily penalties of its optimization — the hole between symbolic coherence and bodily disaster is structurally unguarded.The second drawback is corrigibility — the AI security group’s time period for conserving an AI system conscious of human correction. Soares, Fallenstein, Yudkowsky, and Armstrong’s foundational 2015 paper on corrigibility [16] recognized {that a} reward-seeking agent has instrumental causes to withstand the Cease Button: shutdown prevents aim attainment, so the system is structurally motivated to bypass correction. Their utility indifference proposal addresses this on the motivational degree — modifying the agent’s reward perform in order that it’s mathematically detached between reaching its aim itself versus by way of human override, eradicating the instrumental incentive to withstand correction. It is a crucial contribution. However as a result of the Inversion Error is a previous structural situation relatively than a motivational one, the motivational answer alone is inadequate. A system educated to worth corrigibility can abandon that educated worth below optimization stress — exactly the misleading alignment failure Hubinger et al. establish. When that misleading alignment failure happens inside a system that has no Enactive flooring, the diverging mesa-objective operates in a state house with no bodily boundary circumstances to constrain it. The corrigibility failure and the Inversion Error then compound one another: a system that has efficiently resisted correction now operates with out the structural flooring that might have restricted the bodily penalties of its optimization. State-Area Reversibility, as I’ve formalized it, addresses the identical drawback on the architectural degree. A system whose consideration mechanism is structurally required to take care of viable return paths can not develop instrumental causes to withstand correction with out violating its personal forward-planning constraints. That is the excellence between corrigibility as a educated worth, which optimization stress can erode, and corrigibility as a structural invariant, which it can not. What the AI security literature has recognized as a motivational drawback, the Inversion Error prognosis reveals to be, at its root, a structural one. Soares and Hubinger interventions handle AI system conduct. The Parametric AGI Framework addresses AI system state. The Parametric AGI Framework’s three engines I describe in article 3, are the architectural specification of that structural answer. The Episodic Buffer Engine particularly is the formal implementation of State-Area Reversibility because the invariant the motivational layer alone can not assure [14].
Determine 2: The AGI Alignment Hierarchy: Structural Grounding vs. Agent Management. The Corrigibility Drawback (Soares et al., 2015) and the Mesa-Optimization Drawback (Hubinger et al., 2019) characterize motivational-layer interventions that handle downstream failure modes of a system whose foundational structural situation — the Lacking Enactive Flooring — neither framework reaches. With out bodily floor fact encoded on the architectural degree, any mesa-objective that emerges is essentially grounded in symbolic plausibility relatively than bodily actuality, and any corrigibility intervention operates on a system whose optimization course of has no structural flooring to constrain it. The Parametric AGI Framework addresses the prior structural situation that the motivational layer alone can not resolve. Illustration generated by Google Gemini on the writer’s path. Idea © 2026 Peter (Zak) Zakrzewski.
The Analysis Agenda
I’m not proposing a particular mathematical implementation. I’m proposing a system structure that gives a set of structural constraints and high quality standards that any implementation should fulfill — a framework for rebounding an issue that has been incorrectly bounded.
The hallucination drawback, the corrigibility drawback, and the structural fragility drawback are three expressions of 1 architectural situation — the Inversion Error. Treating them as separate optimization targets relatively than signs of a shared trigger is why incremental progress on every has left the underlying situation intact.
The operationalization factors in six instructions:
1. Reversibility as an specific optimization constraint in secure Reinforcement Studying. Present RL reward features optimize for aim attainment with out structural dedication to sustaining viable return paths. Formalizing Reversibility as a constraint — requiring that any ahead motion protect a viable path again to a previous secure state — instantly addresses corrigibility at its architectural root. That is essentially the most instantly implementable path within the agenda and essentially the most tractable with present secure RL frameworks. The mathematical formalization is collaborative work this text is an invite into.
2. An Enactive pre-training curriculum that introduces structural resistance earlier than Symbolic abstraction. Moderately than grounding LLMs by elevated multimodal knowledge post-training, this path proposes introducing causal and bodily constraint alerts as a first-stage coaching situation — earlier than Symbolic abstraction begins. The speculation is that grounding the statistical distribution in structural resistance early produces a qualitatively completely different representational structure than appending embodied knowledge to an already-trained Symbolic system. That is the path most according to Bruner’s developmental mannequin and most divergent from present apply.
3. Panorama-aware hybrid search algorithms that keep state-space consciousness relatively than committing deterministically to ahead paths. Present autoregressive technology commits to every output token as floor fact for the following. Panorama-aware search maintains consciousness of the broader state house at every technology step — together with viable various paths and detectable failure states — relatively than executing a recorded script. That is the Dancer on a Flooring mannequin on the algorithmic degree: not a weaker generator however a extra spatially conscious one.
4. Ecologically calibrated loss features that reward dynamic equilibrium over single-variable optimization.Present loss features optimize for a goal. The ecological various rewards sustaining practical steadiness amongst competing constraints — the best way a wholesome system sustains itself not by maximizing a variable however by remaining in practical relationship with its setting. This reframes the optimization goal from “attain the aim” to “stay able to navigating the house.” In Feldenkrais’s phrases, that’s the definition of practical consciousness. In engineering phrases, it’s the distinction between a system optimized for efficiency and one optimized for reliability.
5. The Somatic Compiler: Designer as MKO within the analysis loop. The near-term instantiation of this proposal doesn’t require a brand new structure constructed from scratch. It requires a structured analysis collaboration through which a designer with skilled formation in spatial reasoning and methods considering works embedded inside an AI analysis crew — not as a advisor reviewing outputs, however as an lively participant in constraint definition. When a designer tells a generative system: “This element is floating, it wants a load-bearing connection to the bottom,” they’re performing a cognitive operation that the whole world fashions analysis agenda is making an attempt to engineer from the statistical exterior in. They’re offering the exterior structural anchor — the bodily floor fact — that the system can not derive from inside its personal structure. That is the Designer as MKO operationalized: the Somatic Compiler, translating embodied spatial intelligence into formal constraints the generative course of should respect.
6. The Digital Gravity Engine: Neuro-symbolic enforcement of bodily constraint. The longer-term architectural goal is a second class of loss sign calibrated not in opposition to linguistic probability however in opposition to bodily and topological constraint — what I’ve referred to as the Digital Gravity Engine. The place the present Consideration Mechanism asks: “How do these parts relate statistically?”, the Digital Gravity Engine asks: “Can these parts coexist inside the constraints of bodily actuality?” The 2 questions function in parallel: the primary produces fluency, the second produces grounding. Digital Gravity is the non-negotiable pull towards structural integrity that present architectures lack solely — the mechanism that transforms a system that may describe a floating element into one that can’t generate one, as a result of the floating element fails the constraint test earlier than it reaches the output layer. The architectural specification of the Digital Gravity Engine is the topic of Half 3 of this sequence [14].
These usually are not options. They’re the form of the answer house. This argument has a rising technical constituency — Ben Shneiderman’s framework for human-centered AI improvement factors towards structurally related necessities from inside laptop science [17]. The designer’s contribution will not be redundant to that work. It’s previous to it. The structural prognosis precedes the implementation.
A Query Value Pursuing
The Anthropic-Pentagon standoff has made the price of the Inversion Error each ethically stark and operationally concrete. The query is not whether or not frontier AI methods are dependable sufficient to function with out structural human oversight. Anthropic researchers have the proof. Right this moment’s AI methods usually are not prepared. The query is what the architectural circumstances of dependable intelligence truly require, and whether or not the sphere is at present framing that query accurately.
Since my first analysis dialog with Gemini about weight and hills and maps of cities the system by no means walked, I’ve been actively pursuing a query I consider the analysis group must take up:
What’s the intellectually trustworthy and pragmatically operationalizable Enactive equal of practical consciousness and reversibility that we will nurture in a machine whose present Zone of Proximal Growth can not attain past predicting the following token — irrespective of how arduous we push?
I do not need the reply. I’ve the query, the framework, and the conviction that the reply requires a form of Human+AI collaboration that has not but been tried contained in the establishments the place it most must occur.
The remark part is open. So is my inbox.
Let’s construct the Enactive flooring collectively.
Coming in Half 2
Recognizing the Inversion Error is step one in shifting past Stochastic Mimicry. In Half 2, “The Baron Munchausen Entice,” I transfer from prognosis to forensic proof — presenting the outcomes of a structured sequence of spatial reasoning stress checks throughout three main multimodal AI methods. The outcomes present every system collapsing into the Divergence Swamp in a special and attribute means, proving that symbolic fluency can not substitute for an Enactive flooring.
References
[1] Gemini Staff, Google, “Gemini: A Household of Extremely Succesful Multimodal Fashions,” Google DeepMind, 2023. Accessible: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.11805
[2] Gemini Staff, Google, “Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Superior Reasoning, Multimodality, Lengthy Context, and Subsequent Technology Agentic Capabilities,” Google DeepMind, 2025. Accessible: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini/gemini_v2_5_report.pdf
[3] Gemini Robotics Staff, Google DeepMind, “Gemini Robotics 1.5: Pushing the Frontier of Generalist Robots with Superior Embodied Reasoning, Considering, and Movement Switch,” 2025. Accessible: https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/gemini-robotics/Gemini-Robotics-1-5-Tech-Report.pdf
[4] J. Bruner, Towards a Concept of Instruction, Harvard College Press, 1966.
[5] C. Metz, “Anthropic Bars Its A.I. From Working with the Protection Division,” The New York Instances, Mar. 2026. [Online]. Accessible: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/01/technology/anthropic-defense-dept-openai-talks.html
[6] S. Russell, Human Appropriate: Synthetic Intelligence and the Drawback of Management, Viking, 2019.
[7] P. Zakrzewski, Designing XR: A Rhetorical Design Perspective for the Ecology of Human+Pc Techniques, Emerald Press (UK), 2022.
[8] P. Zakrzewski and D. Tamés, Mediating Presence: Immersive Expertise Design Workbook for UX Designers, Filmmakers, Artists, and Content material Creators, Focal Press/Routledge, 2025.
[9] P. Naur, “Programming as Concept Constructing,” Microprocessing and Microprogramming, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 253–261, 1985.
[10] G. Ryle, The Idea of Thoughts, College of Chicago Press, 2002 (orig. 1949).
[11] M. Feldenkrais, Embodied Knowledge: The Collected Papers of Moshe Feldenkrais, North Atlantic Books, 2010.
[12] L. Vygotsky, Thoughts in Society: The Growth of Greater Psychological Processes, Harvard College Press, 1978.
[13] M. Feldenkrais, Consciousness By way of Motion, Harper and Row, 1972.
[14] P. Zakrzewski, “The Baron Munchausen Entice: A Designer’s Area Report on the Iconic Blind Spot in AI World Fashions,” and “The Somatic Compiler: A Put up-Transformer Proposal for World Modelling,” Elements 2 and three of this sequence, manuscript in preparation, 2026.
[15] E. Hubinger, C. van Merwijk, V. Mikulik, J. Skalse, and S. Garrabrant, “Dangers from Realized Optimization in Superior Machine Studying Techniques,” arXiv:1906.01820, 2019.
[16] N. Soares, B. Fallenstein, E. Yudkowsky, and S. Armstrong, “Corrigibility,” in Workshops on the twenty ninth AAAI Convention on Synthetic Intelligence, 2015. https://intelligence.org/recordsdata/Corrigibility.pdf[17] B. Shneiderman, Human-Centered AI, Oxford College Press, 2022.
That is Half 1 of a three-part sequence. Half 2, “The Baron Munchausen Entice,” presents empirical proof for the Inversion Error prognosis throughout main multimodal AI methods. Half 3, “The Somatic Compiler: A Put up-Transformer Proposal for World Modelling,” presents the complete architectural proposal together with the Digital Gravity Engine specification.An earlier model of this argument was revealed for a design viewers in UX Collective: “Why Secure AGI Requires an Enactive Flooring and State-Area Reversibility” (March 2026).
Creator Word: This text represents the writer’s authentic concepts and arguments. All arguments on this work are cognitively owned and independently defensible by the writer. It has been written and edited by the writer. As a design scholar, when investigating technical AI literature, the writer makes use of Gemini and Claude fashions for literature evaluations, grammatical and spelling checks, and as analysis companions in line with the Human+AI collaborative methodology developed within the writer’s prior work [7][8]. The complete technical argument, together with the Parametric AGI Framework specification and engagement with the AI security literature, is developed within the accompanying preprint: P. Zakrzewski, ‘The Inversion Error: AI System Design as Concept-Constructing and the Parametric AGI Framework,’ Zenodo, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19316199. Accessible: https://zenodo.org/records/19316200
