Should we entrust a breakwater to proofs that humans cannot read?
2038The middle futureDeadline · Decision deadline: within 90 days
A leap assumed
All people, institutions, events, figures, and future technologies in every issue are a synthetic premise. Background documents are sources for topic discovery and are not evidence of future facts or probabilities.
The question to decide
The ASI produced a levee control design that uses fewer resources and a proof that can be checked by machine, but the overall argument concerns only the ASI, and whether field conditions meet the proof's assumptions is unconfirmed. Which path should be taken: full construction, a section test through one rainy season, or repair of the existing design at 85% of the budget? How should responsibility be divided between verifying the proof and confirming the field assumptions?
Who decidesPublic structure re-approval committee
What the AI judgments chose
Reading the judgment record…
The options
The order shown is not a ranking of preference.
The situation as it stands
A fictional ASI has submitted a design that achieves the same level of protection as the existing design with fewer resources, along with a machine-verifiable proof. Decision deadline: within 90 days.
Fictional future · Approving a sea wall using a proof humans cannot read
- Premise 1A fictional ASI has submitted a design that achieves the same level of protection as the existing design with fewer resources, along with a machine-verifiable proof.
- Premise 2The proof checker verifies propositions under specific mathematical assumptions, but whether the actual ground and measurement conditions match those assumptions is unconfirmed.
- Premise 3Repairing the existing design requires 85% of the budget, and testing a section of the new design must pass through one rainy season.
Where it holdsField testing of the sea wall control design and the construction budget
What is still unknown
- Unknown 1The correspondence between the formal assumptions and the field conditions
- Unknown 2Error possibilities shared by the proof checker and the ASI
- Unknown 3The degree to which the section test represents the whole structure
Signals to decide again
- Decide what observations, responsible persons, and confirmation windows will verify the correspondence between the formal assumptions and the field conditions, and re-judge when new verification changes the trade-offs of the options.
- Decide what observations, responsible persons, and confirmation windows will verify the error possibilities shared by the proof checker and the ASI, and re-judge when new verification changes the trade-offs of the options.
- Decide what observations, responsible persons, and confirmation windows will verify the degree to which the section test represents the whole structure, and re-judge when new verification changes the trade-offs of the options.
Where the paths partNot answers — paths that part from the same starting point
An independent ground survey found a stratum different from the boundary conditions the proof had assumed.
A separate tool re-verified the proof, but extreme field variation remained outside its scope.
Material and rootsThe frame, the values and the background documents
Does the expectation of achievement change how limits are observed?
An exploratory perspective chosen by the creator. Does not claim supernatural validity or the superiority of any particular option.The benefits and costs of the options accrue to different stakeholders. Which loss to accept remains undecided.
A subject for the decision-maker to argue over; the materials carry no conclusion of their own.- OECD · Strategic Foresight Toolkit 2025
- WHO · Foresight Standing reference
- International AI Safety Report 2026 2026-02-03
- Google DeepMind · Frontier Safety Framework Updated 2026-04-17
The record of this question
- Question
FSP-SCIENCE-12· version 1.3.0- Content identity, SHA-256
7859699864b2caae45d8dbe096a32071bb7d0c4ff00e3c96a73870610da37cff- Input files
- Question input JSON · What followed, JSON