Capture Chain Distortion
Sensor and software transduction treated as direct access to the agent's commitment
Even the expressive act passes through a measurement chain — hardware, firmware, drivers, input method — before it becomes a record; treating the captured bytes as the commitment itself ignores transduction gaps identical in kind to pragmatic ground truth.
A keystroke is not a commitment. It is a voltage pattern interpreted by a keyboard controller, delivered through an operating system input stack, buffered by application code, and only then persisted as a decision event. Each step can delay, duplicate, drop, or transform the signal. The record certifies what the application received — not necessarily what the finger intended, at the moment intended.
In software systems
Input handling bugs produce committed events from phantom clicks: double-submit races, touch-screen ghost touches, autocomplete replacing user input before commit, clipboard paste inserting wrong content. Mobile keyboards correct “definately” to “definitely” silently; the committed text is not what the user typed. Voice-to-text pipelines commit transcripts with homophone errors and no confidence metadata.
Architecturally, the commitment boundary sits at persistence — after the entire capture chain — with no record of the chain itself. Debugging discovers the event log is honest about the final payload and silent about how that payload was produced. Downstream systems reason as if the agent directly inscribed the conclusion, when in fact they received the output of a fallible transduction stack.
In human organisations
Analog capture chains are equally invisible. A court reporter’s transcript becomes the official record of testimony; the reporter’s mishearing is committed as spoken word. A scribe writes a physician’s dictation; the scribe’s error enters the chart as the physician’s decision. Paper forms pass through OCR; the digitised version is what the system commits to, not the original handwriting.
Organisations treat the digitised or transcribed artefact as the decision because that is what entered the workflow. The measurement chain — human or machine — is forgotten the moment the file is accepted.
In socio-technical systems
Wearables, biometrics, and ambient interfaces push commitment capture further from deliberate expression. A gesture triggers approval. A gaze dwell time confirms consent. A driving app’s autopilot handoff timer records “driver attentive” from proxy signals. Each design collapses transduction into commitment for friction reduction.
When incidents occur, investigators find committed events that faithfully record what the capture chain produced — and poorly represent what the human experienced as their act of deciding. The socio-technical stack optimised for seamless capture; epistemic humility about the chain was left out of the schema.
Structural causes
Epistemic tier collapse
Capture chain distortion treats the final persisted value as unmediated commitment. Recording input provenance (device, method, raw vs normalised text), confirmation before commit, and confidence or correction events narrows the sensor gap — parallel to how pragmatic ground truth carries instrument metadata. The commitment remains tier one; the chain metadata says how far from the agent’s expressive act the record actually sits.