What is Caretaker Doping?
Caretaker Doping, a framing metaphor from Michael Darius Eastwood, draws on the semiconductor practice of introducing controlled impurities into silicon to change its properties. It applies that image to the proposal that ethics should be load-bearing at the substrate of an artificial-intelligence system rather than added as later filters. Concept-level treatment only, TRL 0-1, no prototype.
Caretaker Doping is a framing metaphor from Michael Darius Eastwood, drawing on the semiconductor practice of introducing controlled impurities into silicon to change its properties. It applies that image to the proposal that ethical considerations should be load-bearing at the substrate of an artificial-intelligence system rather than added as later filters. The concept is presented at concept level only, at technology readiness level 0-1, with no prototype.
Caretaker Doping is first named as a concept in the 30 April 2025 self-emailed manuscript (position 2 of the priority chain) and receives its full published treatment in Infinite Architects (2 January 2026, ISBN 978-1806056200). Companion book essays elaborate the metaphor without moving beyond concept-level description.
The treatment on this site respects the standing hardware-dark ceiling for silicon concepts, which is a two-sentence description referring to cryptographic tokens in silicon at TRL 0-1 with no prototype. Caretaker Doping is one of six hardware-adjacent concepts in the 37 named concepts of Infinite Architects that are held at concept level and never elaborated with fabrication steps, dopant profiles, gate topology, tamper-detection circuits, coherence mechanisms or key-extraction resistance. The purpose of Caretaker Doping is philosophical - to reframe alignment as substrate rather than surface - not to specify how such a substrate would be built.