Named concepts

Eight original named concepts in AI governance.

• Responsibility Fog

  2024

  When a hiring algorithm rejects a candidate, who is responsible — the developer, the deploying organisation, the vendor, the regulator? Responsibility Fog describes the systematic diffusion of accountability in AI-mediated decision-making — not a bug, but an emergent property of how institutions adopt algorithmic systems.

  Proto-concept first appeared in a 2015 BA thesis on telecom data retention, nine years before it was named. Introduced in 'Beyond Fragmentation' (MA, 2026).

• Cognitive Debt

  2026

  Expanded and formalised to describe the gradual erosion of human evaluative capacity through sustained algorithmic dependence. Not that AI makes us lazy, but that repeated delegation of judgment creates a compounding deficit — visible only when the system fails and no one remembers how to think without it.

  The term originates in software engineering; the contribution is its extension and formalisation for AI governance — not the coinage itself. Applied in UNAK and GRÓ curricula.

• VALOR Framework

  2026

  A structured alternative to prevailing models (EU AI Act, NIST RMF), grounded in McMurtry's life-value onto-axiology — asking not 'what is the risk level?' but 'does this deployment enable or disable the means of life?' Validated against three production systems at UNAK.

  Introduced in 'Beyond Fragmentation' (MA, 2026). Contains a built-in self-critique: the framework itself risks becoming a Benevolent Cage — that tension is intentional.

• The Investment–Sentiment Gap

  2026

  An empirical finding: for every $33 invested in AI development, $32 flows toward automating tasks workers value and want to keep, while $1 targets tasks they actually want automated. Not a market inefficiency — a structural misalignment between capital and human need.

  Introduced in 'Beyond Fragmentation' (MA, 2026). Method: cross-referencing Crunchbase venture data with worker-sentiment surveys.

• The Benevolent Cage

  2026

  Governance frameworks designed to protect human autonomy can themselves become mechanisms of control — setting boundaries so rigid they prevent the adaptive capacity they claim to preserve. At what point does protection become containment?

  Introduced in 'Beyond Fragmentation' (MA, 2026). Exists in deliberate tension with the VALOR Framework.

• Diagnostic Sociology

  2026

  A methodological contribution that transfers diagnostic thinking from clinical practice to social-systems analysis. Diagnostic sociology reads institutional patterns, identifies systemic failures, and proposes targeted interventions before collapse becomes irreversible.

  Guiding principle of the method: 'Treat the patient, not the monitor.'

• Cognitive Complacency

  2026

  Where Cognitive Debt describes judgment erosion, Cognitive Complacency describes the prior condition: wealthy societies with the best resources to deploy AI meaningfully are the ones reducing it to a convenience layer. Rwanda uses it to save lives; Western welfare states use it to roast marshmallows.

  Introduced in 'Beyond Fragmentation' (MA, 2026). A precursor to Cognitive Debt.

• Access Shock

  2025

  AI disrupts the access economy of expertise, not just labour markets. The scarcity models of legal, medical, financial, and academic knowledge collapse as access to expertise is democratised.

  Introduced in 2025 in the essay 'Access Shock: A Theory on the New Rules of the AI Economy.' Amplifies Cognitive Debt.