Corrigibility Framework

A structural framework for evaluating Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and Epistemic Public Infrastructure (EPI).

Corrigibility: The structural capacity of those affected by a system to detect error, signal harm, and trigger correction—without incurring material loss or irreversible consequence.

Downloads

Paper	Focus	Download
Paper I: DPI	Deterministic infrastructure (ledgers, registries, payment rails)	PDF
Paper II: EPI	Learned/agentic systems (AI, ML models)	PDF

The Five Tests

Test	Question	DPI Focus	EPI Focus
EXIT	Can users refuse participation without penalty?	Non-digital alternative	Human fallback guaranteed
CODE	Is the system's execution observable?	Source code	LWD-R (Logic, Weights, Data, Representation)
AUDIT	Can independent parties verify behavior?	Transaction logs	Statistical bounds + drift monitoring
GOVERN	Do affected populations have binding authority?	RFC/charter process	Action boundary protocol
FORK	Can the system be replaced without permission?	Code + data portability	Compute accessibility

Fatal Failure Property: Failure of any single test disqualifies a system from designation as public infrastructure.

Schemas & Skills

See corrigibility-schema repository for:

• Schemas: infrastructure.json and audit.json for DPI/EPI
• Assessment Skills: skills/assess/ with test rules (EXIT, CODE, AUDIT, GOVERN, FORK)
• Examples: Reference implementations

Key Concepts

DPI (Paper I)

• Functional Exit Equivalence (FEE): Architectural guarantees that recreate error-signal strength when literal exit is impossible
• Rule of the Ledger: When authority is exerted through synchronized, self-executing artifacts

EPI (Paper II)

• LWD-R: Four-layer transparency (Logic, Weights, Data, Representation)
• Action Boundary Protocol: Deterministic envelope around stochastic inference
• Variety Drift: The growing gap between frozen model variety and evolving environmental variety
• Compute Capture: When "open weights" fails FORK due to prohibitive retraining costs

Citation

@article{aravind2026corrigibility-dpi,
  author = {Aravind, Anivar A},
  title = {Corrigibility as a Structural Precondition for Digital Public Infrastructure},
  year = {2026}
}

@article{aravind2026corrigibility-epi,
  author = {Aravind, Anivar A},
  title = {Epistemic Capture and the Action Boundary},
  year = {2026}
}

License

CC0 1.0 (Public Domain)

Author

Anivar A Aravind · ORCID: 0009-0009-8995-0005