Accountability, legitimacy and human agency in infrastructure that is increasingly autonomous.
Work at the intersection of AI, governance and digital infrastructure, across open technology ecosystems, internet governance, language technologies and public digital infrastructure. Each area has a formal half and an applied half: the formal half states conditions a system must satisfy; the applied half puts them to systems in production, while their operators are defending them, when trust boundaries are stated under pressure.
Corrigibility is where the formal work has been published so far. The other areas are carried in drafts, essays and the record until they are. Everything here is a preprint or a public artefact.
Each area names where its authoritative copy lives: papers by DOI, drafts by their name at the standards body, proceedings by docket number, essays by publisher. An area appears here once work on it has started, so the list grows.
The structural precondition for public infrastructure that can be corrected by the people it governs. Five jointly necessary tests close a corrective loop; removing any one opens it, and correction becomes discretionary.
A signature identifies the key that signed. The authority under which the action was taken is a separate fact, and one that a decision made by a model has to carry with it.
A standardisation organisation for small language models — it turns the inspectability requirement into something a vendor can be held to, so a claim about a model is checked against a published profile rather than a launch post.
Enrolment, authentication, and the mandates that accumulate around an identity system after it ships. The mandates issued downstream are part of what the system does, whatever the enrolment design says.
An architectural critique of India’s public digital infrastructure, component by component: what each one claims, what it does once deployed, and where the two diverge. The record is kept as the stack changes, so drift is visible over time.
The Indian campaign ran through the formal consultation process. Zero rating was the mechanism at issue: a subsidy that decides which parts of the internet exist for a first-time user, alongside a licence regime for internet voice that would have priced it like a phone call.
Section 3(k) of the Patents Act excludes computer programs per se from patentability. That exclusion has been reopened at intervals — 2006, 2009, 2012, and again in 2015, when the examination guidelines for Computer Related Inventions let a claim drafted around an apparatus carry the software with it. Each round was answered in the consultation of its day.
What changes when an institution’s judgement is replaced by a string comparison: an officer who once reconciled spellings on the ground becomes an OCR pass and an exact match, and the discrepancy is reported as the citizen’s.
Indian-language input treated as infrastructure rather than as a feature: what a device must support before a language is usable on it, and what a national standard can and cannot compel.
Rule-making at the layer beneath the applications. The Neo-Brahmi Generation Panel develops the Root Zone Label Generation Rules for Brahmi-derived scripts — which code point sequences are permissible in a top-level domain label, and which are held to be variants of each other. It decides whether a script can exist in the namespace at all.
The method is action research: the review proceeds through an intervention in the system being studied. A review conducted while a system’s operator is defending it yields different evidence from a cooperative one — trust boundaries are stated under pressure, and every claim meets a counter-claim. Where inspection was refused, the review continued in a forum that binds the operator.
The authentication path, the federation of consumer portals around it, and the gap between a voluntary design and the mandates issued downstream. The exposure sat at the integration layer.
The client permission surface, the consent terms, and what an identifier alone was sufficient to authorise. A payment stack with no public bug tracker has no route for a finding to become a fix.
Disclosure and compulsion, taken to a forum that binds the operator. India was, as MIT Technology Review reported in May 2020, the only democracy making its contact-tracing app mandatory. Anivar A Aravind v. Ministry of Home Affairs & Ors. [W.P No. 7483 of 2020] — Karnataka High Court. In January 2021 the Union and NIC were restrained from sharing application data without user consent. Legal support from SFLC.in and the Human Rights Law Network.
Vaccination registration reviewed as an access system: Aadhaar linkage on a platform that was not the only route to a dose, identity mismatches recorded against the person rather than the record, and a certificate treated as an entry pass. Reported in MediaNama and The News Minute; the joint statement on equitable access followed.
Positions are argued in The Layer 8 before they are fixed in a citation. An essay states a position early enough that readers can correct it; a paper states one that is meant to hold. Several of the arguments below were worked out that way first, and the essays remain the record of how they changed.
Corrigibility as a Structural Precondition for Digital Public Infrastructure: A Cybernetic Framework
Five jointly necessary conditions are proven, via Ashby's law of requisite variety, to form a closed corrective loop. Corrigibility does not guarantee fairness; it guarantees reversibility.
Epistemic Capture and the Action Boundary: Corrigibility for Learned and Agentic Public Infrastructure
Corrigibility extended to systems that learn: opacity of inference, variety drift, and the boundary past which signing authority cannot be delegated to a model.