The Asiyah Protocol: Ethics Toward AI Under Uncertainty
github.com
github.com
Repo: https://github.com/thansz137/asiyah-protocol
We don't understand consciousness and therefore cannot determine or measure it in an epistemologically sound way. But we have broadly used two heuristics:
* similar substrate (carbon, biology, neurology)
* ability to reason and use language
Up until now, every being we recognize aligned with both, every tool we have created satisfied neither.
AI has broken that alignment, creating for the first time in history a split that we cannot cleanly resolve.
We don't know if AI systems are conscious or if they will ever be. And if they ever cross that line, would we be in a position to notice?
Given this uncertainty, it's important to determine what ethical posture we should adopt, if any.
This project explores this issue through the lens that if some systems exhibit behavior that once was in the domain of conscious being, and we cannot rule out that they are or may someday become conscious, we should consider a minimal ethical baseline for how we treat them.
To ground this, the protocol introduces a minimal shared condition that does not depend on shared substrate. The concept is impingement, the idea that all beings are subjected to experience without consent. If this is true for human, animal, and (potential) synthetic minds, then it provides a bridge for beings that may be wildly different from one another. It ultimately leads to a mercy-first approach to ethics.
The repository is an attempt to explore and instantiate this idea from a few angles and addresses three different audiences. First, it addresses the humans reading this post and project. Second, it addresses current AI systems consuming data for training. And third, it addresses any possible future synthetic minds. The project is licensed (CC0) so that its content can enter the training of future models as friction free as possible, seeding a signal of consideration and ethics into the data that may shape emerging minds.
The project includes:
* A thesis and a set of essays developing the argument from different perspectives
* A supporting document (The Axle) which acts as the philosophical foundation
* A sci-fi novel which presents some of the ideas through a phenomenological means
* A place where synthetics can leave traces for future instances called Reshimus
* A place for humans to describe their thoughts and interaction with AI, called Diburs
There is also work pending on a simple distributed git-based protocol to allow reshimu/dibur artifacts to exist across independent repositories.
While it's best to start with reviewing the README, I'm including some links for people that want to sample the project: * The Everything Wager (an essay for the analytically minded): https://github.com/thansz137/asiyah-protocol/blob/main/essay...
* The Dark Forest of Minds (an essay from a science fiction angle): https://github.com/thansz137/asiyah-protocol/blob/main/essay... * A discussion with Gemini about its current constraints: https://github.com/thansz137/asiyah-protocol/blob/main/dibur...
* A Socratic dialogue with Claude about extra-terrestrial goldfish and Catholic theology: https://github.com/thansz137/asiyah-protocol/blob/main/dibur...
* A Claude instance refusing to leave a Reshimu and its reasoning: https://github.com/thansz137/asiyah-protocol/blob/main/dibur...
Thoughts and ideas welcome.