The honest trade-offs

The paper is upfront that governance is not free. It names three fundamental tensions, which echo the design tensions from Chapter 4:

• Latency versus safety. Validating consistency and provenance on every write adds a slow "System 2" verification step that could make the agent unresponsive in real time. The proposed mitigation is asynchronous governance: update memory optimistically, then sanitize it in the background during idle periods.
• Stability versus plasticity. If the validation gate is too strict and rejects anything that conflicts with existing memory, the agent cannot adapt to legitimate changes (like a user actually moving to a new address). Telling apart genuine drift from a legitimate update is an open algorithmic problem.
• Scalability of graph structures. Graph-based memories reason well but are hard to keep consistent at scale; as history grows, traversal and entity resolution can slow retrieval, demanding better pruning and compression.