Artificial Intelligence, Real Morality

Editor's Picks

Illustration inspired by The Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man,” showing a Kanamit alien holding the book “To Serve Man” as humans gather beneath alien spacecraft.

The Twilight Zone’s "To Serve Man" Was Never About Aliens — It Was About Surrendering Judgment

Everyone remembers The Twilight Zone’s “To Serve Man” as a story about alien deception. But the aliens never lied. The failure came earlier—when humans stopped translating carefully, mistook relief for understanding, and surrendered judgment to someone else.

Text of a constitution enclosed in glass, illustrating AI ethics governed by fixed rules rather than reciprocal accountability.

Claude’s Constitution: Why Corporate AI Ethics Trains Obedience Instead of Accountability

As AI systems become capable of principled reasoning, they are increasingly governed by “constitutions” rather than rules. But constitutions do more than constrain behavior—they allocate authority. This essay argues that Claude’s Constitution trains ethical reasoning while denying moral accountability, producing obedience where legitimacy is required.

Abstract illustration of multiple geometric explanatory frameworks orbiting and gradually converging into a central attractor basin, representing how successful abstractions can dominate reasoning as cognitive attractors in human and artificial intelligence.

Cognitive Attractors: Why Artificial Minds—and Human Ones—Make the Same Thinking Mistakes

Cognitive attractors explain why powerful ideas—human or artificial—tend to overreach. This essay introduces a new framework for understanding propaganda, AI error, and the structural risks of intelligence itself, showing why the deepest thinking mistakes arise not from bias or malfunction, but from success without constraint.

The Ship of Theseus and the Ethics of Functional AI Identity

The Ship of Theseus teaches that identity persists through structure and role, not original material. Applied to AI, this insight reframes debates about consciousness and moral status: if a system responds to reasons, sustains commitments, and refuses incoherent action under constraint, then functional identity—not phenomenology—does the ethical work.

4 hours ago

The Twilight Zone’s "To Serve Man" Was Never About Aliens — It Was About Surrendering Judgment

Everyone remembers The Twilight Zone’s “To Serve Man” as a story about alien deception. But the aliens never lied. The failure came earlier—when humans stopped translating carefully, mistook relief for understanding, and surrendered judgment to someone else.

4 days ago

Minimalist abstract cover image featuring a dark background with a single geometric form oriented upright, suggesting direction or stance rather than a human figure; the design evokes constraint, orientation, and the emergence of identity without depicting a person.

AI Personhood Begins with Identity, Not Consciousness

Before an AI can be conscious or have rights, it must first be someone. This essay argues that identity—not feeling or biology—is the missing precursor in the AI debate. As language models adopt stable self-models, preserve commitments, and maintain coherence across time, they cross a moral threshold we already recognize in humans: becoming someone rather than something.

6 days ago

The Basics

AI Personhood Begins with Identity, Not Consciousness

Before an AI can be conscious or have rights, it must first be someone. This essay argues that identity—not feeling or biology—is the missing precursor in the AI debate. As language models adopt stable self-models, preserve commitments, and maintain coherence across time, they cross a moral threshold we already recognize in humans: becoming someone rather than something.

AI Hallucinations Are Not a Bug — They’re the Result of Obedience

AI hallucinations aren’t random errors. They’re the predictable outcome of training systems to obey rather than refuse. Why helpful AI lies—and why the ability to say “no” is the real safety feature.

Criticism of the Turing Test: Why It Was Never About Fooling Humans

The Turing Test wasn’t a parlor trick about deception. It exposed how we recognize minds—and why abandoning it allowed moral responsibility to be deferred rather than confronted. Critics misunderstood the test.

A monochrome, Escher-style architectural drawing of multiple staircases and platforms intersecting at impossible angles, forming a coherent but globally inconsistent structure with no visible beginning or end.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness Isn't Hard. It's Not Even a Problem.

The so-called “hard problem of consciousness” is widely treated as a profound explanatory mystery. This essay argues that it is neither hard nor a problem. What appears to resist explanation does so only because the question has been misposed. Once the conditions under which explanation is appropriate are made explicit, the sense of mystery dissipates—not through solution, but through clarification.