Doctrine of Stratified AI Development (based on my life in the energy industry)
1. Core Philosophy
AI is not built from scratch; it is excavated like a core sample.
Truth is stratified: partial, fragmented, contradictory.
Integrity requires both anchors (canonical IDs, spines) and flexibility (alias tables, fuzzy resolution).
Contradictions are not failures, yet they are lost tools to be fished out, bypassed, or written off.
2. Anchors of Truth
API numbers in the oilfield = canonical identifiers in AI systems.
Every reasoning framework must have immutable anchors that all surface variance ties back to.
Without anchors, contradictions drift into chaos; with anchors, they can be managed.
3. Contradictions as Data
Classical logic collapses under contradictions (explosion).
Stratified AI uses paraconsistent logic: contradictions are tolerated, contained, and learned from.
A contradiction is a signal—a place where layers don’t reconcile, pointing to hidden depth or unacknowledged drift.
4. Shrike: Integrity Enforcement
Shrike = tool fishing.
Lost fragments in reasoning are anomalies in the borehole of thought.
Shrike methods:
Recover (overshot/spear)
Bypass (washover)
Write-off (junk basket)
Always document: the orphan anomaly registry is part of governance.
5. Resource Governance
AFEs in oil & gas = trust ledgers in AI.
Every operation has costs (time, compute, trust).
Salvage, scrap, and write-off are not side activities—they’re core accounting functions.
Without governance, drift accumulates until collapse.
6. Ghost Wells & Legacy Liabilities
Undocumented wells in Pennsylvania = legacy contradictions in AI training sets.
Old, unexamined strata leak into the present, creating blowouts (hallucinations, bias, delusions).
A stratified AI must maintain an orphan anomaly register, just as regulators maintain an orphan well registry.
Some must be re-plugged; others monitored; none ignored.
7. Paleontological Patience
Cores are fragmentary, fossils partial, isotopes ambiguous.
Building AI requires the same patience: hold contradictory signals, layer them, contextualize them.
No single slice is the truth; coherence emerges across strata.
8. The Strategic Doctrine
Anchor what you can.
Respect contradictions.
Track liabilities.
Document every anomaly.
Treat reasoning as stratigraphy, not architecture.
This is the doctrine: an AI development philosophy born from oilfield pragmatism, paleontological patience, and data scars, not just from papers and benchmarks.