Definition
The decay of correction capacity in the absence of replenishment. The people who knew the manual process leave, the alternative supplier lapses, the rollback script stops being run. Nothing fails and nothing is decided; the institution simply becomes less able to correct than it was, and the loss is recorded nowhere because no event produced it.
Depreciation is measured per capacity rather than as a single score. Each capacity in the dependency record carries a last_exercised date, a status of retained, degrading, or lost, and a change_since_last_assessment of replenished, unchanged, or consumed. A capacity that is listed but has never been exercised is a claim, not a capability.
It matters because preserved capacity and institutional reversibility are stocks rather than properties: ordinary operation spends them, and only deliberate expenditure puts them back. Depreciation is how correction capacity falls behind delegated authority with no decision to reduce it, and it is the mechanism underneath normalized dependence.
Scale: Organizational · Phases: Deployment, Audit · Measurability: Fully measurable · Maturity: Active research
Adjacent terms
References
- Dependence and reversibility eval · Eval
- Laws for engineering delegated intelligence · Doctrine