These six principles imply that a system reduces dependence on era-specific constraints not by escaping constraints, but by being designed to withstand many of them simultaneously.

1. It must provide alternative pathways and regulatory rules for dealing with failure, uncertainty, and incompleteness.
2. It must strike a balance between avoiding unnecessary waste of representational space and preserving flexible future extensibility.
3. The number of states or possibilities that a single unit can represent or contain should not be overly impoverished.
4. Even if constituent resources or implementation substrates change, the system must preserve role-level and functional compatibility.
5. It must allow gradual transition and provisional emulation on top of existing systems.
6. Its designed structure must remain realistically implementable under real-world constraints.