Susan Calvin didn't design ethical robots. She designed contracts robots couldn't wriggle out of.
The Calvin Convention is six contractual mechanisms that encode pre-action constraints and human control as architecture — not policy, not culture, not training:
- Right of Override — attributable, logged, narrowly scoped.
- Right of Refusal — the system can refuse unsafe continuation without penalty.
- Pre-action Constraints — hard boundaries the system cannot optimize around.
- Edge-case Registry — named failure modes with mandatory human re-entry.
- Attribution Chain — every output carries the provenance of the decision path.
- Audit Trail as Battlefield — the log is a legal instrument, not a log file.
These are not policies. They are clauses. They live in procurement contracts, not in culture decks.