Machines that know they are aging: a framework for hardware-aware autonomous intelligence

arXiv:2607.28451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous systems inevitably age, yet their artificial intelligence typically assumes hardware remains in its original condition. Batteries degrade, sensors drift, processors accumulate timing errors, and memory reliability declines, creating a growing mismatch between assumed and actual capability. This can lead to agnostic collapse, where mission failure arises from accumulated hardware degradation rather than a single component fault. We propos...