The Turing Theory and the Law of the Dead Asset: Institutional Time, Cognitive Risk, and Sanctified Erasure

This paper formalises the Turing Theory, a diagnostic model of institutional recognition failure in which high intensity cognitive agents are systematically excluded during their lifetime and valorised only after neutralisation. The theory is anchored in the Law of the Dead Asset, which holds that institutions can safely recognise surplus cognition only once it has been rendered inert through death, silencing, exile, or administrative flattening. In this paper, Alan Turing is used as a diagnostic case rather than a biographical subject. The analysis identifies a recurring institutional sequence of extraction, rejection, and posthumous appropriation. This sequence persists within contemporary academic, bureaucratic, and technological systems that publicly celebrate innovation while operationally enforcing procedural conformity. The paper concludes by examining the implications of this failure mode for artificial intelligence governance and epistemic justice, arguing that systems optimised for predictability risk reproducing the same architecture of erasure in both human evaluation and machine mediated decision making.