Source work
The Two Pots
Adaptation proposal
C · Structural skeleton only, reframed as an AI-native dilemma
Adaptation note
Retains the fable's unequal companions carried by the same current, the stronger one's offer of protection, and the fragile one's insistence that even a slight touch would break only one of them. The asymmetry becomes an AI-native problem in reciprocal model updates: a perturbation negligible to a vast general system can erase the rare distinctions that constitute a small specialist mind. The resolution makes safe distance an active collaboration protocol—signed proposals, shadow evaluation, locally accepted changes, and no shared writable state—so either participant can refuse without being overwritten.
Adapted into
AI Fable · Asymmetric Safety
The Distance Between Errors
The institute called the learning compact equal because Lilt and Monument could update each other. Lilt called it unequal because only one of them could survive a careless touch. Their collaboration began when they stopped treating closeness as proof of trust and built a distance where refusal could arrive intact.