The Governance Lag Index: Timing the Gap Between Risk and Rule
Audio deep dive into the Governance Lag Index — a four-stage schema timing how long a documented AI failure mode stays unregulated, and why it may not close.
Generated for project: Governance Lag Index
Every safety regime we trust was written in arrears. Aviation grounded the 737 MAX months after the first crash; the NRC rewrote its rulebook within a year of Three Mile Island. In mature high-stakes industries the lag between a documented failure and an enforceable rule is real but finite — typically one to three years. The Governance Lag Index asks an uncomfortable question: what if, for AI, that interval doesn’t close at all?
This episode walks through the Index’s four chronological stages — Documentation, Framework, Enactment, Enforcement — and the deliberately strict v0.1 schema where a stage is either a dated, citable instrument or it is PENDING. No partial credit for good intentions. It traces the early entries: prompt injection, named in 2022 and carrying a zero-click CVE by 2025; deceptive alignment, demonstrated in Claude 3 Opus in December 2024 — failure modes that are empirically on the record while their Enforcement columns sit empty in every jurisdiction on earth.
The stakes turn personal at the edge of embodied AI, where a manipulated reasoning trace on a machine with actuators becomes a physical-harm vector governed by workplace-safety law written for forklifts. The Index is the instrument for putting a date on that gap instead of an adjective.