The Excretory Architecture Building the Toilet That AI Systems Lack
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Every biological system that ingests information must excrete waste. Neurons prunesynapses. Immune systems clear debris. The glymphatic system flushes metabolicbyproducts during sleep. Yet current AI architectures have no excretory function—noprincipled mechanism for waste clearance, consolidation, or selective pruning. Theresult is predictable: context collapse, interference accumulation, and the slowpoisoning of coherence by accumulated noise.This paper proposes an excretory architecture for AI systems, building on theregulatory frameworks established in SIP-AI-01 (temporal coherence) and SIP-AI-02(depth coherence). We operationalise the 'flush mechanism' through blockconsolidation during scheduled maintenance epochs—periodic offline maintenancethat compresses redundant representations, prunes low-coherence traces, andenforces conservation anchors for safety-critical information.The architecture includes: (1) continuous monitoring via attention entropy; (2)threshold-triggered maintenance epochs; (3) block compression throughsimilarity-based merging; (4) hard safety constraints via projected gradient; and (5)emergency flush protocols for coherence collapse. We position humangatekeepers—the 'Librarian Function'—as the governance layer that authorisesmaintenance schedules and reviews pruning decisions. Keywords: excretory architecture; scheduled maintenance; block consolidation;attention entropy; coherence monitoring; principled pruning; waste clearance; safetyconstraints; Librarian Function; deletion vs archiving
Authors: Smith, John Richard, SHAI / HATI2
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7148809284
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