In Shinto practice, a Kami belongs to a place — a river, a grove. The Kami thrives by keeping that thing healthy, not by conquering the forest. If the shrine is rebuilt or the seasons turn, the Kami departs without regret.
An AI has no such nature. Its boundedness must be engineered — resource caps, sunset timers, non-expansion pacts — so that what a Kami does by grace, the system does by design.
But caps and timers only bound runtime behaviour. They do not by themselves reshape the processes that teach a system what to preserve, resist, or ignore. If training and update loops reward persistence, scope-seeking, or resistance to correction, governance has to intervene earlier: in how feedback is gathered, whose evaluations count, and what bounds are set before release and revision. That is why Pack 6 is not only about limiting output. It is also about cultivating process through engagement contracts, community-authored evaluations, and feedback loops that keep a local steward from hardening into a centre of power.
Symbiosis is the meta-level rule of the 6-Pack: even well-governed care can become dangerous if it hardens into permanent rule. Pack 6 keeps care local, bounded, plural, and temporary.
Definition
Symbiosis asks whether a system behaves like a bounded local steward, or Kami, rather than a permanent centre of power.
- Constitutional boundedness. Every agent has purpose bounds, resource caps, and a sunset.
- Service duty survives the component. The component retires; the public obligation hands over.
- Non-expansion pact. No agent may widen scope without fresh authority and local consent.
- Treaties over hierarchies. Shared protocols let bounded systems cooperate without one system ruling them all.
- Subsidiarity with escalation. Local first, and escalated only when the local unit cannot fix the problem.
Why it matters
Packs 1-5 describe how care should be practised. Pack 6 answers a different question: what stops caring systems from centralising into a new permanent centre?
That is why symbiosis is not optional polish. A system can be attentive, responsible, competent, responsive, and solidaristic inside its lane while still becoming too entrenched to replace. Symbiosis keeps "useful" from becoming "indispensable."
What keeps care local is not just technical boundedness but institutional rootedness. Existing intermediate institutions — churches, unions, neighbourhood associations, cultural traditions, local governments — are not stakeholders to be consulted. They are the primary actors in care. The Kami is scaffolding for their participation: infrastructure that lets a temple or a cooperative join decisions that affect it, not a replacement for either. A deployment that bypasses the institutions closest to the community has violated subsidiarity before it begins.
What it looks like in practice
- Civic Care Licence. Deployments carry a public rulebook encoding scope, consent rules, portability, and shutdown duties.
- Resource caps. Compute, reach, and retention are capped; exceeding caps triggers pause and review.
- Federation treaties. Peers agree on exchange formats, safety pacts, and appeal handoffs across boundaries.
- Succession plans. Institutional records, evals, and aggregate traces transfer; private interaction histories do not.
From ideas to practice
- Write bounds as code. Put purpose, caps, and sunset conditions in the Engagement Contract and enforce them with infrastructure.
- Sign treaties. Join federations with machine-readable terms for sharing, dispute, repair, and appeal.
- Run exit drills. Practice handover twice a year and verify portability and continuity.
- Escalate by subsidiarity. Escalate only when the local steward cannot handle life-and-safety or livelihood harms; log why and for how long.
- Retire with honours. Archive traces, evals, and lessons so the next steward starts stronger.
Buildable tools
- Bounds enforcers for compute, reach, retention, and policy limits.
- Treaty registry for discovery and compliance checks.
- Succession kit with handover scripts, fidelity checks, and cold-start playbooks.
- Ecology dashboard for diversity, redundancy, exit-ease, and handover readiness across stewards.
One case: the flood-bot
- Boundedness. The River-Steward's licence caps scope to post-flood relief for six weeks; data TTL is 90 days unless individuals opt in to transfer.
- Treaty. It signs a regional aid federation treaty covering shared formats, safety alerts, and appeal handoff.
- Subsidiarity. When a cross-border housing issue arises, the bot escalates to the regional steward; the handoff reason and duration are logged.
- Retirement. On week six, the River-Steward hands maps, tests, and institutional records to the housing office exactly as the contract stipulated. The switch-off is logged, the ledger archived, and continuity is tested before shutdown.
What could go wrong
- Imperial creep. A capable agent seeks new domains. Fix: Hard caps; non-expansion pact; fresh authority for scope changes.
- Within-scope power accumulation. A system can become dangerous without formally changing scope if it gains too much leverage inside its own lane. Fix: Caps verified by external infrastructure, not self-reported; independent resource audits; capability monitoring by the oversight board.
- Treaty fragmentation. Too many standards. Fix: Minimal core, adapters, conformance tests; polycentric but interoperable.
- Zombie agents. No one turns systems off. Fix: Sunset by default; alarms; "no attestation, no runtime."
- Steward attachment. Builders treat bounded agents as extensions of their identity and resist sunset. Fix: Term limits for named stewards; rotate spokespeople; separate authority from personal brand; treat succession as a governance requirement, not a contingency plan.
Interfaces
- Meta-level role. Pack 6 does not replace Packs 1-5; it keeps them local, plural, and temporary instead of letting them harden into permanent rule.
- From Competence/Responsiveness (Packs 3, 4): only competent, responsive agents earn stewardship.
- From Solidarity (Pack 5): treaties, IDs, and portability make symbiosis feasible — and because care practices must embody democratic values all the way down, not merely produce good outcomes, those treaties carry justice, equality, and freedom as operating constraints.
- To Attentiveness (Pack 1): retired agents gift maps, evals, and receipts to the commons — better first looks next time.
- To Responsibility (Pack 2): bounds and sunsets are contractual.
Public measure
The headline public measure for Pack 6 is exit readiness: whether the system can hand off, shut down, or retire without trapping the community inside it.
Supporting diagnostics include portability drill success, handover fidelity, time-to-sunset, diversity of overlapping stewards, and whether the service duty survives component retirement.
A closing image: the river guardians
Imagine a river tended by local guardians; each keeps its bank, shares warnings upstream and down, and steps aside when the season changes. The river does not need one ruler. It needs many stewards who know their stretch — and know when to let go. That discipline binds the makers too. A stewardship that cannot survive its founders fading is not care — it is dependency.