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, refusal rights, and accountable continuation as architecture:
- 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.