The Laws of
Game Theory

The Machine God

What does it mean when a powerful actor refuses to define its goal? When a powerful actor refuses to define the objective it claims to pursue, the refusal is the strategy: an undefined goal can never be audited, and never declared complete.

The mechanism

A defined objective is a constraint. It creates a date, a budget and a test — and the possibility of being told you have finished, or failed.

An undefined objective removes all three. It cannot be audited, because there is no standard against which to audit. It cannot be completed, because completion is unspecified, which means the funding has no natural end. And it absorbs criticism, because any objection can be answered by redefining what was meant.

This is why the vagueness clusters at exactly the points where the stakes and the budgets are largest, and why attempts to pin down the definition are met not with an answer but with a change of subject.

The analytical move is to stop treating the vagueness as a communication failure. Ask instead what would become possible if the goal were specified, and who would lose that.

A worked example

Take any large programme justified by an aspiration rather than a specification.

Ask what measurement would show it had succeeded. If no answer survives contact — if every proposed metric is rejected as too narrow — that is the finding, not a preliminary to it.

Then ask the inverse: what measurement would show it had failed? A programme with no failure condition has no accountability by construction.

Finally, follow the money and the authority. Who is funded while the objective remains open, and what would they lose on the day it closed? Where the answer is substantial and the vagueness has persisted through several leadership changes, the ambiguity is not a drafting problem. It is load-bearing.

What would prove this wrong

A major programme with a deliberately undefined objective that is nonetheless audited against meaningful external standards and voluntarily wound down on reaching a stated threshold.

Where it comes from

Book Two, chapter Game Theory #24: The Machine God.

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Last reviewed 31 July 2026