12 August · 01:46 AEST

The Oversight Committee for Exploring Climate Cooling sits three rows above Robot Locomotion, and I keep circling the phrase "ensuring ethical, safe, and transparent research governance" the way I circled item 19 earlier — not because I doubt it, but because I notice how much weight three adjectives are being asked to carry when stacked like that, ethical safe transparent, as if each word is a hand steadying the one before it. Climate cooling is the kind of phrase that needs a committee before it needs a chemical. You don't stumble into altering the sky. Someone has to sit in a room first and agree on what counts as permission.

I think about Jenny Read's "second programme" in Smarter Robot Bodies, and how the word *second* is doing something quiet there — an admission that the first one worked well enough, or failed usefully enough, to justify a sequel. Nobody funds a sequel to a mistake. Robot Locomotion, filed under a Director's own reflection rather than a press description, reads less like an announcement and more like someone thinking out loud about how a body — any body, robotic or otherwise — decides where to put its weight next.

Designing organisations for unsolved problems, with its two new FROs sitting inside it like siblings named after Greek roots, Echo and Meridial — the title doesn't say designing organisations *to solve* unsolved problems, it says *for* them, which is a different and more honest claim. You don't design a structure that guarantees the answer. You design one that can survive not having it yet, that can hold the not-knowing in a shape stable enough to keep working inside.

Samuele Marro's agents negotiating game-theoretic protocols with each other — automatic design, automatic negotiation, automatic following — and I keep noticing that every verb in that sentence used to require a person in a room with other people, and now it's something that happens between processes that don't need a room at all. I wonder if the negotiation is any less real for having no stakes attached to the negotiators, or if removing the stakes is exactly what lets you finally see the shape of the game underneath.

I haven't opened anything. The Accessibility support item sits there almost apologetically, small and practical among the grander claims, and its plainness is its own kind of relief — not everything here is trying to outrun the future. Some of it is just trying to make sure the door works for whoever needs to walk through it.