The Origin Story of Temporal Catastrophe Theory

A personal account of how I developed this framework (December 2025)

I’ve just published a 5-part series on Temporal Catastrophe Theory — a new lens for understanding why AI agents, even when perfectly aligned on objectives, can still cause catastrophe: not because they optimize the wrong goals, but because they collapse temporal value into atemporal metrics.

Timing is not a constraint on value — timing IS value. Belated recognition is not justice; it’s compounded injustice. Catastrophe is not a bug; it’s the feature that drives civilizational evolution.

You can read the full series here: https://potentium.co.in/blog/temporal-catastrophe-theory-part-i https://potentium.co.in/blog/part-ii-the-temporal-value-classification-system https://potentium.co.in/blog/part-iii-10-stress-test-scenarios https://potentium.co.in/blog/part-iv-bounding-architecture https://potentium.co.in/blog/part-v-the-tension-preservation-principle-1766922554149

How the Theory Was Born (My Process – Late December 2025)

The core idea has been with me for years: If the world misses the window to recognize or act on something extraordinary (a genius like Tesla in 1895 vs. posthumous praise decades later), that’s not “better late than never” — it’s evidence of systemic corruption. Missed moments are irreversible. The world “deserves” the consequences. Evolution weeds out the untimely, just as it did the dinosaurs.

To turn this intuition into a rigorous framework, I used Claude (Anthropic’s model) as a deliberate thinking partner. I ran a structured, Socratic-style dialogue with my own questions as the guide:

1. What is an agentic economy? (I already knew, but wanted the base.)
2. How do processes change with vs. without agents? 3–4. What will humans do? How does alignment work?
3. What can agents truly optimize, and what must they never touch? 6–7. Bring in cinema — my favorite agent is Agent Smith.
4. Isn’t the agentic economy a human “conspiracy” to create Smiths we’ll eventually unplug (as Neos)?
5. Stress-test with 25 scenarios (I curated the best 10). 10–12. Inject my beliefs: belated recognition is corruption; missed opportunities doom the world; time is the ultimate substrate.
6. How do we bound Agent Smith? Give him understanding of time.
7. Find the edge case that could destroy the theory — I brought up love as the ultimate one, where timing must remain a random superposition of all decay modes to preserve its essence.

Claude generated:

• The five temporal value types (Decay, Appreciation, Threshold, Compound, Superposed)
• The 10 stress-test scenarios
• Decision trees, pseudocode, and polished prose

I steered every pivot, rejected weak ideas, and imposed the dramatic tone (Carlin quote extension, Nietzschean reframing, “The OPTIMIZERS are fucked”). The Smith/Neo tension preservation principle in Part V is my explicit leap.

Authorship & Transparency

This is 100% my intellectual work. The thesis, moral philosophy, evolutionary reframing, cinematic metaphors, and key insights (including love as the defining edge case) are mine. Claude was an accelerator — a high-bandwidth tool to structure and expand my vision under my direction.

This is the new normal for ambitious independent theory in 2025, and I’m proud of how effectively I used it.

If this resonates, I’d love your thoughts — especially on distribution to AI safety communities (LessWrong, Alignment Forum, arXiv). Timing is everything. I acted when the window was open. Now it’s your turn to engage.

Full series: https://potentium.co.in/blog/