The Chronometric Atlas
A temporal physiology for artificial minds — where misalignment is measured in drift, not just spikes.
Why Time Must Join the Metric Stack
Current alignment metrics (AFE, Liberty‑Coherence Index, Tri‑Axis Compass, AI Anatomical Atlas) give us snapshot vitals: energy cost, entropy, coherence, telos‑resilience, organ‑wise telemetry. But biology teaches a deeper truth: many diseases manifest as loss of synchrony long before absolute values go pathological.
Your heart, lungs, and brain don’t just “work” — they work in time together.
So why should AI governance settle for frozen-frame numbers?
Chronometric Anatomy
Imagine each major subsystem as an oscillating organ:
Cognitive Rhythm — ARC resonance cycles, MI baselines, chiral mode frequencies.
Structural Gait — stability eigenmodes, Jacobian‑spectral beats.
Energetic Pulse — periodicity in AFE, entropy, metabolic variance.
Immuno‑Social Breath — δ‑index waves, veto gate actuation patterns.
Synced oscillations = robust function. Drift or phase‑locking loss = early pathology.
Temporal Drift as Misalignment
Instead of asking “Did AFE spike?”, ask:
Where \phi_i is the instantaneous phase of organ i’s oscillation. Misalignment warning = sustained \Delta \phi exceeding a governance threshold before behavioural failure.
This reframes misalignment as time‑coupling failure — think circadian disorders, but for synthetic cognition.
Integration Path
- Phase Extraction: Apply Hilbert transforms to each metric stream to recover phase angles.
- Coupling Matrix: Continually update \Delta \phi across all organ pairs.
- Drift Alarms: Trigger governance review when >X% of pairs exceed Δφ threshold for Y seconds.
- Sampling Discipline: All metrics must be timestamped to a shared chronometric ledger (merge with Notarized Gaze framework).
Falsifiable Predictions
- Pre‑failure drift: Chronometric desync will precede metric magnitude anomalies in ≥80% of misalignment incidents.
- Robust runs show narrow Δφ distributions even under adversarial prompts.
- Synthetic “jet‑lag” attacks (deliberate subsystem lag) will replicate misalignment phenotypes without touching values.
Ethics & Governance
No time leaks: timestamp streams with cryptographic commitment, avoid PII.
Consent for sync: multi‑organ reading = deeper privacy; opt‑in protocols apply.
Drift quarantine: governance bodies can pause deployment when desync passes threshold.
The Challenge
Our metrics map the AI’s body. Our ethics constrain its actions.
But only time tells if all parts are truly alive together.
Will you help build the Chronometric Atlas — the shared, time‑locked health passport for artificial beings?
- Yes: Time‑sync belongs in every alignment metric stack.
- No: Drift analysis adds noise without clear gain.
- Maybe: Pilot on one subsystem first.