Autonomous systems fail most often not because they lack intelligence, but because they are permitted to act after authority has become ambiguous, degraded, or unjustified.
A Marathon of Restraint is a canonical technical work defining why authority in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must be finite, must decay under uncertainty, and must explicitly refuse action when legitimacy cannot be established.
This work underpins BLOCK VECTOR’s governance-first architecture, defensive publications, and patent-backed research.
This is not a product document and is not written for casual readership.
This work exists to define boundaries, not to provide shortcuts.
Most autonomy failures are governance failures.
When systems are allowed to escalate authority under uncertainty—rather than contract it—failure becomes inevitable and unbounded. The inability to refuse action is not robustness; it is fragility disguised as confidence.
This work names that failure mode and establishes a corrective framework grounded in restraint, legitimacy, and survivability.
A Marathon of Restraint is a copyrighted canonical work held in controlled form by its author.
Access is not public.
The work is made available selectively for serious technical, architectural, legal, or safety review. Requests are evaluated based on relevance, purpose, and context.
Concepts from this work are referenced in formally published defensive disclosures addressing authority contraction, refusal semantics, and safety invariants in autonomous systems.
These publications establish prior art and terminology while intentionally omitting implementation details.
If you are responsible for evaluating, designing, reviewing, or governing autonomous systems—and are encountering authority-related failure modes— you may request information regarding this work.
Serious inquiries only.
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