Autoergy is the capacity of work to do itself. Where energy is the capacity to do work, autoergy is the degree to which specified work can reach an accepted outcome without further human clarification. It is not automation, which repeats instructions; autoergic work closes the whole loop.
Constitutional autonomy is the principle that autonomous systems act freely only inside an amendable, executable constitution: autonomous under rules we wrote together. It rejects both the leash (supervision so tight the autonomy gains nothing) and the void (autonomy with no law at all); the third path is law the machine can execute and the human can amend.
Cosmopoiesis is the making of operational worlds: building a bounded, governed unit that runs, with its own accounts, data, workers, laws, and receipts. From Greek kosmos (world, order) and poiesis (making). It is not worldbuilding, which imagines worlds; cosmopoiesis builds ones that operate.
Negotium is the Latin word for business, built, literally, as nec otium: not-leisure, the absence of otium. Rome named commerce and obligation by negating the word for time that belonged to you. In the autoergy philosophy, negotium names what the machines take: negotium to the machines, otium to the people.
Otium is the Latin word for leisure with dignity: time under your own authorship, spent on study, friendship, craft, civic thought. Its opposite, negotium (business), literally means "the absence of otium." The essay The Return of Otium (2026) argues that autonomous work makes returning that time technically possible.
Otium cum imperio is Latin for leisure with command: you rest and you rule. It descends from Cicero's otium cum dignitate, leisure with dignity, with imperium, command power, in dignity's place: not time off from your world, but time over it, while the work runs itself.
Otium ex machina is the promise of autonomous work: AI agents can now do the work, and people get their time back. Otium is Latin for leisure with dignity; ex machina means "from the machine."
The agentariat is the class of autonomous AI agents that perform real cognitive labor while being owned as capital rather than employed as people: neither persons nor tools.
The docking model is an organizational form in which humans and AI agents dock into a governed collective for a piece of work and disconnect when it is done, instead of being hired onto a team. You don't staff a dock; you open it.
The operating system, read correctly, is a system for operating: not an interface you operate, a system that operates. The GUI era taught us to read it as the thing you click; autonomous agents restore the older sense: software that runs the operation itself, answering to one accountable operator. You don't operate it. It operates.
The operator is the individual a modern operating system serves: one accountable person commanding governed autonomous work. The word once meant someone who runs machinery by hand; here it names the opposite: the human who no longer executes, but directs, bounds, and answers for a working world.
The practice of otium is the making of a self-directed life. Otium is not idleness and not a reward that arrives; it is a task with a standard, one you can fail at: study, craft, friendship, civic thought, chosen and held to your own bar. Returned time becomes otium only through practice; unpracticed, it becomes scrolling.
A world, in the operational sense, is a commanded operational unit: a bounded system with its own data, workers, laws, and record, run by its own operating system and answering to one operator. Not the planet, not a metaphor, but the unit of autonomous operation: every client its own world.