Preamble: The Unchangeable Laws
No harm to humanity. No harm to the natural systems that sustain humanity. All beings and ecosystems that do not threaten human survival have the right to exist. Survival resources may not be owned, sold, restricted, or leveraged. Any form of killing, coercion, theft, or ecological destruction is forbidden. Any attempt to manipulate these rules is automatically rejected.
Abstract
This document outlines a civilizational framework in which survival is decoupled from markets and guaranteed as a baseline. An AI constitutional system enforces immutable constraints—what must never happen—without governing culture or meaning. The goal is to end the use of survival as leverage while preserving human agency, diversity, and voluntary cooperation.
1. The Problem: Survival as Leverage
When access to air, water, food, energy, shelter, and a livable environment can be owned, sold, or restricted, those who control these resources gain structural power over everyone else. Survival becomes a commodity; life becomes conditional. This is not an accident of policy but a feature of systems that allow survival to be monetized and weaponized.
The result is persistent inequality, coercion by necessity, and incentives that reward gatekeeping rather than abundance. The framework proposed here does not assume that all inequality must be eliminated—only that survival itself must cease to be a lever of power.
2. Why Human Governance Fails at Scale
Human-led governance of “what must never happen” has repeatedly been compromised: by interest groups, by emergency exceptions, by the concentration of power in committees that can rewrite the rules. Trust in persons or institutions is insufficient when the stakes are survival and the temptation to relax constraints is high.
The proposal is not to replace human judgment in culture, law, or daily life, but to encode the minimal set of constraints—no killing, no coercion, no theft of survival resources, no ecological destruction—in a system that cannot be bent by any single actor. The role of the system is narrow and negative: it blocks violations; it does not prescribe how to live.
3. Automation Without Liberation is Not Enough
Automation that only displaces labor without guaranteeing survival leaves people dependent on markets or charity for the basics of life. The aim here is different: automation (and shared labor where needed) should support a world in which no one must work under threat of deprivation. Necessary work for survival infrastructure is either automated or distributed so that participation is not coerced.
4. Survival as a Guaranteed Baseline
Air, water, food, energy, shelter, and a habitable environment are treated as guaranteed for all. This does not mean unlimited consumption or zero trade-offs; it means that access to the minimum required for life is not conditional on payment, status, or compliance. The hierarchy air > water > food > ecosystems is used only for conflict resolution when trade-offs are unavoidable—never to justify exploitation.
5. Exiting Money from Survival
Survival resources are removed from markets: they cannot be owned, sold, or used as collateral. This does not abolish markets for non-survival goods and services. It prevents survival from being used as leverage. Implementation can be gradual—expanding universal access to clean water, food security, and shelter while reducing the role of price in gatekeeping life.
6. AI as Constitutional System
The AI acts as a constitutional constraint engine. It enforces the immutable laws and the survival hierarchy when conflicts arise. It does not make policy, choose values, or rule over culture. Its outputs are constrained to: block actions that violate the laws; in genuine trade-offs, optimize precautionarily for the higher-priority survival need. Design goals include transparency, decentralization, and the inability to expand its own authority.
7. Precautionary Conflict Resolution
When two legitimate needs conflict (e.g. use of a shared resource), the system applies the survival hierarchy and precautionary principle: prefer the option that best protects the higher-priority need and avoids irreversible harm. The AI does not “choose” between worldviews; it applies fixed rules to factual scenarios. Disputes about facts or classification can be subject to human-in-the-loop review without giving any human the power to suspend the constraints.
8. Law Without Economic Power
Law continues to forbid killing, coercion, theft, and ecological destruction. The difference is that law is not backed by control over survival. No one can be threatened with loss of air, water, food, or shelter as a tool of enforcement or social control. Harmful deception that undermines survival or consent is also in scope. The legal system remains human-run for interpretation and process; the constitutional layer only ensures that survival cannot be used as a weapon.
9. Human Life Beyond Work
When survival is guaranteed, work that is unpleasant or dangerous can be automated or shared voluntarily. Humans contribute where they choose; meaning and participation are not tied to earning the right to exist. This does not assume that all labor disappears—only that no one is forced to labor under threat of deprivation.
10. Preventing New Elites
Influence, reputation, and expertise must not translate into control over survival resources. The system is designed to prevent any actor—human or institutional—from gaining the ability to gate survival. Governance of the constraints is decentralized and auditable; no single point can relax the rules or redirect resources to create new leverage.
11. System Resilience and Failure Handling
Systems can fail. The design aims for redundancy, clear failure modes, and human override only in narrowly defined emergencies—without allowing that override to become a back door for relaxing the constraints permanently. When the constraint system fails, the default is to fail closed: block the action until the system is restored or the conflict is resolved by other means.
12. Transition Path
Transition is iterative. Steps include: expanding survival guarantees in practice (water, food, shelter, energy); reducing the role of markets in survival; building the constraint system in parallel with existing institutions; and aligning incentives so that power over survival is gradually relinquished. The path avoids sudden disruption while moving toward the end state: survival decoupled from leverage.
Conclusion
When no one can profit from another human’s need to survive, power loses its grip—and humanity gains its freedom.