Infrastructure That Judges: A Formal Architecture for the Knowledge-to-Wisdom Transition in Autonomous Infrastructure Control Systems

This paper addresses the ethical and epistemological apex of autonomous infrastructure control: the formal architecture by which an AME installation escalates from Knowledge to Wisdom in Beer's Viable System Model hierarchy. Drawing on Targowski's semantic hierarchy (Data, Information, Concept, Knowledge, Wisdom), the paper specifies five Wisdom Agents — Ecological Guardian, Hydrological Ethics, Cultural Sensitivity, Safety Sentinel, and Temporal Steward — each enforcing a verifiable external ruleset with hard or soft veto authority. A seven-step Knowledge-to-Wisdom Algorithm integrates multi-criteria decision analysis, deontic logic constraints, and a human escalation backstop. The paper introduces the concept of ethical hallucination for the failure mode in which a system claims to evaluate non-engineering criteria while operating on a proxy metric. Dedicated to Professor Andrew Targowski of Western Michigan University, HCoB. First paper of the AME Ethics/Construction Duology. This paper is part of the AME Hexalogy, the third collection in the AME research series by J.O. Danenberg, Aveotto LLC. Prior collections: AME Physics Trilogy (Papers 1–3, January 2026) and AME Education Pentalogy (Papers 5A–5E, February 2026), both available on Zenodo under ORCID 0009-0003-9549-2107. The Hexalogy comprises the AME Autonomy Tetralogy (Infrastructure That Feels, Heals, Strengthens, and Learns) and the AME Ethics/Construction Duology (Infrastructure That Judges and Fortifies).