The Plateau Economy: Admissible Power and Auditable Evidence After Exponential Scaling

Compute and model capability have advanced through sustained scaling of hardware, systems, and training regimes. Yet as autonomy becomes operational infrastructure, deployability is increasingly constrained by admissibility under contest: whether actions remain defensible, stoppable, replayable, and insurable. This paper proposes We propose “The Plateau Economy” as a governance-and-integration hypothesis: as marginal capability increases, the dominant constraints in many real deployments tend to shift toward energy, integration complexity, liability exposure, downtime risk, audit burden, and oversight — so the scarce resource often becomes auditable evidence throughput rather than raw inference throughput. We define Admissible Power as capability weighted by admissibility, introduce Registered Windows and anti-gaming progress measures as baseline standards for translating performance into contestable, signable power, and discuss how advances in compute (including photonic approaches, quantum research directions, and thermodynamic-efficiency frontiers) may push the capability frontier while simultaneously raising the bar for evidence, controls, and governance. We connect these primitives to verifier-first research programs in computational complexity and argue that scaling can enlarge experiments but cannot substitute for carryable receipts and representation-invariant progress. We close with falsifiable measurements for detecting and engineering plateau conditions.