Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher
Published
Four events across six days. The print edition of the book. The ebook edition. The BBC broadcast of Google Quantum AI's Willow announcement. An email from the author to the BBC presenter carrying the two hashes. This article records the sequence and refuses to inflate what any of it demonstrates.
The print edition landed on Amazon on 2 January 2026 and the author's copy arrived on 6 January, the day the ebook went live and the day before the BBC broadcast. On first mention this site cites the sequence in full, so readers can see there is no drift between two supposedly incompatible dates. The house rule is "print 2 January, ebook 6 January", and the truth gate enforces it.
The Chokepoint, the HARI Treaty, and the Three Ethical Loops are named for the first time in this edition. The published equation is the U equals I times R squared presentation, cited with the artifact. The Babylon and Eden framing carries over from the April 2025 manuscript, with 18 Babylon occurrences and 154 Eden whole-word occurrences at the published counts. The book is the mass-audience version of a research programme, not the research programme itself; that distinction matters for what happened next.
The BBC's Willow segment aired on 7 January 2026, one day after the ebook went live. Willow itself sits at row 2 of the convergence register: Google Quantum AI's first below-threshold quantum error correction, dated 9 December 2024 in the register, one day after the manuscript. The 7 January broadcast is not a convergence in its own right. It is the moment the register's second row entered the popular news cycle, and it prompted the outreach that follows.
On 7 January 2026, the author emailed Faisal Islam at the BBC pointing to the newly published book and to the December 2024 manuscript. This is engagement row E1 in the register, not a convergence row: engagement rows record MDE-initiated contact and are never counted toward the headline number of 19 independently sourced convergences. The email is a matter of record, not an endorsement. Silence in reply is silence: it is not evidence for or against anything.
It put the material in front of a wider audience with fixed dates and a fixed ISBN. It did not close any loop. It did not adjudicate any claim. It did not produce peer review. What it did produce was a checkable artifact, in print and in ebook, whose ISBN a librarian can verify and whose text a hostile reader can search. The register did not begin here and does not end here. It runs from the fortnight in December 2024 through to the June 2026 undecidability proof, and the January 2026 week is one milestone in that arc.
From the book Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything by Michael Darius Eastwood.