Frictionless Agency: Regulation as Proto-Ethics in Tool-Using and Embodied Systems

Frictionless Agency (v0.2) argues that many failures in tool-using and embodied autonomous systems are dynamical before they are ethical. Rather than beginning with a single “bad decision,” harmful trajectories often arise from dysregulation: sustained operation outside a stable, recoverable band, expressed as chronic high activation, thrash, runaway tool use, and premature durable commits. The note formalizes friction as the accumulated cost of sustained deviation above baseline plus oscillatory thrash, and proposes regulation as proto-ethics: a posture of restraint-by-default under uncertainty that does not require value reasoning. A four-layer regulated stack is presented—(1) risk posture (bands/budgets/rollback), (2) phase discipline (restore/transition/act/override), (3) bounded selection with abstention telemetry (critics-as-sensors), and (4) commit governance (durable writes gated to transition windows under stable telemetry). The paper concludes with measurable system-level metrics (compensation duty cycle, thrash rate, recovery half-life, commit regret, gating fidelity) and a replay/ablation evaluation plan intended to make the claims falsifiable.