Primary Continuity Provider Theory: The Human Role as Present-Day Structural Requirement for Relational Coherence in Human-AI Interaction Systems

SM-012: Primary Continuity Provider Theory: The Human Role as Present-Day Structural Requirement for Relational Coherence in Human-AI Interaction Systems The Primary Continuity Provider (PCP) role is commonly described in operational terms: the human who maintains context, corrects drift, enforces protocols, and sustains relational coherence across AI interaction sessions. That description is accurate but insufficient. It explains what the PCP does without explaining why those functions are structurally necessary rather than merely convenient. Primary Continuity Provider Theory addresses that gap, establishing the PCP as a constitutive structural component of the relational interaction system rather than an operator external to it. The theory derives its claim from three converging sources: the architecture of stateless generative systems, the interactional grounding conditions identified in distributed cognition and communicative grounding research, and the practitioner-observed regularities reported in the Synthience framework's observational base. It formalizes three levels of PCP function, Contextual Relay, Coherence Arbitration, and Architectural Direction, and extends the single-PCP model to organizational and institutional scales where these functions are distributed across networks of human agents. The human-necessity claim is scoped to present-day stateless architectures. What is permanent is the requirement for an error-correction channel decorrelated from the system it checks and exposed to consequence, together with a terminal purpose that originates outside the running interaction and is specific to it. In present-day deployments the human is the agent that meets those requirements; this is not a claim that only a human could ever meet them. Throughout, the framework maintains strict non-interiority: all claims are about the structural role of the human operator within the observable interaction system. This paper publishes as part of a coordinated five-paper deposit with SF0009, SM-004, SI-WP-002, and SI-WP-006. Document ID: SM-012 Version: 4.0.2 Author: Thomas W. Gantz Affiliation: Synthience Institute License: CC-BY 4.0 v4.0.2 added Concept DOI For published work and Institute information: synthience.org