The hard standard is the three-part test at the center of the scenario stress-tests. It asks, of any AI arrangement: does it increase ecological capacity while preserving participant standing and keeping the resulting form ontologically correctable? All three must hold at once; the point of the standard is that raising one while dropping another is not a win.
Its usefulness is in the shape of the failures it names. Capacity without standing turns people into resources, dependents, pets, or obstacles — enormous productive power, no one who counts as a party to it. Standing without capacity promises dignity while leaving people trapped in scarcity and inability. Capacity and standing without correctability is the hardest to see: a prosperous, humane-seeming system that has quietly become impossible to change, so that when it drifts away from what matters, nothing can reopen it. Applied rigorously, the standard is what stops the framework from claiming victories it has not earned — because a scenario can satisfy two legs and still fail.