ZLT-P45 — The AI Autonomy Trap (I-9): Speed Without Sight — The Impossibility of Safe Delegation Under Feedback Latency

The AI industry is pivoting from generation (models that speak) to agency (models that act). This shifts risk from semantic error to kinetic error: wrong actions change the world, accumulate history, and can become irreversible. Impossibility I-9 (AI Autonomy Trap): when an agent’s action velocity VaV_aVa exceeds the environment’s observation velocity VobsV_{obs}Vobs, the agent enters Ghost Time—an interval in which it acts on stale state. In Ghost Time, the system becomes structurally indistinguishable from open-loop control: divergence is not a bug but a consequence of feedback latency. This paper provides: A formal I-9 constraint (Speed Without Sight). An operational diagnostic for agentic systems under low observability. A Domain Reduction Lemma (DRL) showing how I-9 transfers across domains via reduction certificates (membership/proxy mapping). Cross-domain instantiation across 26 domains (25 empirical + 1 computational). IAS-AGENCY decision rules for safe delegation under latency and rollback cost. Key takeaway: Autonomy is a function of observability, not intelligence. You cannot delegate what you cannot measure in real time.