The reason the math doesn’t compute is because it’s factorial in nature, not exponential.

If you’re working out the consequences of a chain of agentic actions, then ABCD is very different to DABC. Every sequence has to be treated as a special case of its own.

So the possibilities scale as 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 24 = 4! or “four shriek” as we used to say.

“Five shriek” or 5! is 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 120.

Above a certain point, factorials always scale much more rapidly than exponential functions, they completely run away. This is the “curse of dimensionality” that the agenticists will run straight into with their World models. The moment you start adding extra dimensions, the compute required scales factorially, while the hardware only scales exponentially (Moore’s Law, if you’re lucky). All the data centres in the universe cannot break this curse.

So the governance issue is hitting not just the unobservable, but the uncomputable. The dreaded curse of dimensionality strikes again.