The Principia of Autonomous Governance: Observed Scenarios and Derived Laws

<p><strong>Abstract:</strong></p>
<p>The governance of autonomous artificial agents has historically been framed as a policy challenge, relying on human-readable constraints to dictate behavior. This manuscript argues that high-dimensional autonomous systems operate according to information-theoretic and thermodynamic principles, not social contracts.</p> 

<p>Drawing on foundational cybernetics, we posit that "Drift" (maximum entropy) is the default state of any complex intelligent agent and introduce the <strong>Axiom of Conservation of Governance (G_T = G_E + G_I)</strong>. This axiom demonstrates that in the absence of engineered Explicit Governance mass (G_E), a system does not become "free"; it becomes wholly governed by its Implicit training priors (G_I), leading to predictable catastrophic failure modes such as hallucination or objective misalignment due to distributional shift.</p>