The agentic AI era promised to replace humans with autonomous systems. The evidence shows it failed on two fronts: the technology cannot reliably do what it promised, and the public is rejecting the premise even where it partially works. This paper introduces the Named-Human Test, a single sorting question that separates what failed from what survives, and traces that line across production benchmarks, supermajority polling, enacted law, and frontier-lab disclosures.
Checkpoint-Based Governance
Did AI Write Magnifica Humanitas?Pope Leo XIV Was the Author,but What Was the Governance Method?
The author ran Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical through an AI scanner, found it flagged as plagiarized and AI-generated, then proved both readings wrong through governed human analysis. A first-person account of frustration, recognition, dissent, and hope from a builder who discovered the Pope had reached the same diagnosis from a different authority.
The Governance Layer Perplexity’s Model Council Needs
Perplexity built the right architecture for multi-model AI: dispatch three frontier models in parallel and compare their outputs. What the product does not have is governance over the synthesizer that combines those outputs before any human reads them. This case study maps the gap, proposes four published open-source governance components as the overlay, and identifies why Perplexity’s own engineering culture already practices the checkpoint pattern the synthesizer needs.
The AI Risk Economy: Why Insurance Cannot Price What Governance Cannot Prove
Insurance carriers are writing the rules of AI governance before legislators finish debating them. This working paper proposes a five-tier model that maps where organizations fall on the spectrum from excluded to insurable, identifies the actuarial gap at the center of the emerging practice, and documents the carrier evidence, regulatory signals, and market products that are forcing the distinction between governed and ungoverned AI into the open.
The AI Cognitive Decline Narrative Has Not Tested What It Claims
The peer-reviewed evidence base does not yet support the cognitive-decline claim, and it does not yet support the opposite claim either. Two scientific questions remain open: whether structured human-governed AI use accelerates cognitive development, and what augmented intelligence is in practice. This methodological audit specifies the standards the field would have to meet, scores the existing evidence against those standards, and offers HAIA-RECCLIN Reasoning, HEQ with AIS, and a five-arm randomized controlled trial design as testable counter-proposals.
CARCS: Compliance Accountability Record & Case Study
AI work leaves plenty of trace. The problem is that those traces are scattered across platforms, organized around conversation flow, and not structured around the questions an audit actually asks. CARCS closes that gap with a ten-section governed record built from a three-part prompt suite. It works on any AI platform. Named human sign-off is required before finalization. This working paper releases the protocol for feedback and collaboration from governance practitioners, compliance officers, and researchers.
AI Governance Beyond the Warning: From Tristan Harris’s Diagnosis to the Infrastructure It Requires
A Governance Practitioner’s Response to the Diary of a CEO Interview (PDF Here) Executive Summary Tristan Harris’s November 2025 conversation on The Diary of a CEO reached millions of viewers with a structural diagnosis of the AI race: the same incentive architecture that produced social media’s damage to democracy and mental health is now operating […]
Why AI Cannot Govern AI: Beyond Models to Multi-AI Platforms
1. What the Research Found On April 2, 2026, a research team at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz published a study called “Peer-Preservation in Frontier Models” (Potter, Crispino, Siu, Wang, & Song, 2026). The researchers wanted to answer a straightforward question: if you assign one AI model to evaluate another AI model, and the […]
Crossing Over 1,000 Published Posts: Digital Marketing to AI
In 2009, a blog post about social media. Today, over twenty white papers, three published books with two more pending, and the operating architecture for human-AI collaboration that the industry is still figuring out how to build. This past week, after publishing post 1001, I noticed basilpuglisi.com had crossed one thousand published articles. A thousand […]
Enterprise AI ROI: What Seven Landmark Reports Found, What They Missed, and Five Decisions Worth Making Now
Type: Research Synthesis | Executive White Paper Period Covered: 2025–2026 Primary Sources: Accenture (2025) | Deloitte AI ROI Survey (Oct. 2025) | Deloitte State of AI in the Enterprise (Jan. 2026) | Google Cloud ROI of AI (2025) | McKinsey State of AI (Nov. 2025) | Microsoft Becoming a Frontier Firm (2025) | OpenAI State […]