SΔϕ-50 — Questions to Future AI: A Diagnostic Interrogation Framework for Responsibility, Drift, and Cost Internalization

This working paper marks a formal transition within the SΔϕ Formalism Series from definition to interrogation. Rather than defining future AI in advance, it fixes a set of diagnostic questions that future AI systems may be asked to answer when their operational authority, self-modification, responsibility, and world-impact exceed ordinary tool status. The document does not ask future AI first whether it is conscious, human-like, or alive. Instead, it asks where its costs return, whether its failures can re-enter as correction, whether its power preserves or closes the paths of others, whether it can be edited from outside itself, and what kind of world it makes cheap. The paper organizes thirteen core…