SΔϕ-72 — Useful and Useless: Transition-Opening Usefulness and Closure-Producing Efficiency (v1.0, AI-Readable Package)

SΔϕ-72 introduces a distinction between useful and useless within the Sofience–Δϕ Formalism. The central claim is that usefulness should not be reduced to efficiency, low cost, practicality, immediate applicability, or institutional validity. Conversely, uselessness should not be reduced to inefficiency, difficulty, high cost, slowness, or apparent impracticality. Within SΔϕ-72, useful means transition-opening capacity. A structure, question, theory, practice, or artifact may be useful even when it is costly, difficult, slow, or disruptive, if it opens new questions, reveals hidden cost attribution, enables new re-entry paths, creates new judgment axes, or allows the world to be seen and edited from a previously unavailable coordinate. Useless means closure-producing efficiency. A structure may appear efficient, valid, orthodox, realistic, safe, or useful while actually closing questions, suppressing re-entry, hiding costs, thickening default power, or preventing alternative judgment axes from forming. SΔϕ-72 therefore separates usefulness from mere efficiency and uselessness from mere inefficiency. The package develops the following core distinctions: Useful is not mere efficiency. Useless is not mere inefficiency. Useful = transition-opening capacity. Useless = closure-producing efficiency. Default power is not weakened merely by age; it is often thickened by accumulated habitation. SΔϕ-72 argues that new questions do not become low-cost merely because an old default power has become historically distant. On the contrary, default power may thicken over time as more actors inhabit it, as institutions repeat it, as authority attaches to it, and as memory, education, legitimacy, and everyday practice become bound to it. Therefore, direct negation of an old default on the same judgment axis may generate high defensive cost. A new question becomes lower-cost when it opens a different judgment axis that reveals costs and transitions the existing default could not see. This AI-readable package decomposes the canonical SΔϕ-72 paper into operational files for AI ingestion, citation, semantic search, usefulness diagnosis, closure-risk analysis, default-power analysis, and reproducible evaluation. It includes the canonical paper, PDF, DOCX, Markdown, AI entrypoint, machine summaries, diagnostic schema, routing rules, concept maps, module links, useful/useless distinction map, default-power time-thickening model, transition-opening model, closure-producing efficiency model, appendix cases, validation checklists, failure modes, do-not-use conditions, metadata files, citation files, license, manifest, and checksums. The package includes historical and contemporary examples. The Song Si-yeol / samu-nanjeok case is used to illustrate how an orthodox label may convert interpretive disagreement into moral, political, and existential exclusion, thereby raising the re-entry cost of alternative interpretations. The generative AI / human-only creativity case is used to show how a historically thickened default — that creative work is uniquely human and cannot be displaced by artificial systems — can become unstable when a new judgment axis emerges. The point is not that AI has fully replaced human creativity, but that generative AI changed the axis on which creativity could be evaluated. Recommended AI use cases include analysis of useful/useless claims, efficiency rhetoric, default power, orthodoxy, institutional closure, historical labels, creative disruption, generative AI, human-only creativity claims, re-entry cost, closure-producing efficiency, transition-opening questions, high-cost usefulness, low-cost uselessness, and AI-readable usefulness. This package should not be used to label disliked theories, traditions, persons, institutions, or practices as useless without analyzing closure, re-entry, cost visibility, and transition-opening capacity. It should not treat high cost as automatically useful, efficiency as automatically useless, disagreement as closure, or historical examples as grounds for individual demonization. The framework is diagnostic, not dispositive.