Pith Number

pith:ZNFBNPAZ

pith:2026:ZNFBNPAZGO456CPR75EAH65SLY

not attested not anchored not stored refs resolved

Metis AI: The Overlooked Middle Zone Between AI-Native and World-Movers

Xiang Li

Certain fully digital tasks resist reliable AI automation due to social and institutional entanglements, requiring centaur human-AI systems.

arxiv:2605.14407 v1 · 2026-05-14 · cs.AI

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{ZNFBNPAZGO456CPR75EAH65SLY}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

We identify a class of tasks we call Metis AI... that are performed entirely on computers yet resist reliable AI automation... These characteristics are properties of the tasks themselves rather than limitations of current models.

C2weakest assumption

These characteristics are properties of the tasks themselves rather than limitations of current models, and the appropriate design response is not better automation but centaur architectures.

C3one line summary

Metis AI identifies digital tasks entangled in irreversibility, relationships, norms, and accountability that require human oversight rather than pure automation.

References

43 extracted · 43 resolved · 1 Pith anchors

[1] Big Data , year =

[2] 8th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2017) , series = 2017

[3] Pattern Recognition , year =

[4] Proceedings of the 17th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) , year =

[5] Proceedings of the Tenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD '04) , year =

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-17T23:39:07.411503Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

cb4a16bc1933b9df09f1ff4803fbb25e0c6efd9daab27a42072065d18f234ae1

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.14407 · arxiv_version: 2605.14407v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.14407 · pith_short_12: ZNFBNPAZGO45 · pith_short_16: ZNFBNPAZGO456CPR · pith_short_8: ZNFBNPAZ

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/ZNFBNPAZGO456CPR75EAH65SLY \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: cb4a16bc1933b9df09f1ff4803fbb25e0c6efd9daab27a42072065d18f234ae1

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "75485bc187055f8880d1395d8be7786979ee5fb6f216ffcc059141de6a44278d",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.AI",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-14T05:47:07Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "4aff73517317f0dd5c40c7ff38b7242e5a6f7d925d278ccd4f7d4a49d976a4ad"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.14407",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}