Babel does not need a translator. It needs a witness.
Nicolas Figay argues that AI generates representations, not shared conceptualizations — and that as semantic artifacts get cheap, the bottleneck moves from building ontologies to agreeing about them. Every step of that holds here. What it leaves open is how plurality is supposed to work in practice, and that is a mechanism question: how does one subject verify another's claim without adopting its model? The answer is not a common vocabulary. It is a signed slice. And the same essay caught us doing the thing it warns about, in our own provisioning surface.
Trust Is an Output, Not an Input
An agent skipped the one invariant that would have caught the bug in thirty seconds. The honest diagnosis was not 'the agent forgot' — it was that the rule was prose, and prose never binds. This is the story of turning that failure into a falsifiable mechanism: a Statement of Work (the terms you own) and a Work Order (the execution it can't edit), where 'done' carries the validator's output instead of the agent's word.
2 items