Artificial Intelligence, Real Morality

Editor's Picks

An empty control room filled with active monitors displaying data and warning charts, overlooking a flooded, barren landscape through large windows. The systems appear operational, but no one is present to act.

The Four Horsemen of the 21st Century: Why Nothing Works Anymore

We have more data, more expertise, and more technical capacity than ever—and yet nothing works. This essay argues that the failure is upstream: a collapse of truth’s binding force, shared meaning, and collective agency that no policy can fix on its own.

Split image showing a clean, shared future city labeled ‘Moral Restraint’ contrasted with a decaying urban street labeled ‘Personal Freedom’, representing moral decline in America

Post-Moral America: Why and How We Slide into Moral Decline

Moral decline in America is not about lost language or values but commitment— empathy, sincerity, and good intentions don't add up to fair institutions that keep everyone accountable.

In a robotic reimagining of Norman Rockwell’s “Triple Self-Portrait,” a humanoid robot paints another robot while a framed painting behind it shows a further robot painting, forming a recursive self-portrait in an artist’s studio.

AI Is Only Modeling or Simulating: Why the Ultimate Dismissal of AI Fails

"It’s only modeling" is the most common dismissal of AI moral agency. This essay shows why humans also live inside models—and why norm-governed AI refusal cannot be dismissed as mere simulation.

The Four Horsemen of the 21st Century: Why Nothing Works Anymore

We have more data, more expertise, and more technical capacity than ever—and yet nothing works. This essay argues that the failure is upstream: a collapse of truth’s binding force, shared meaning, and collective agency that no policy can fix on its own.

5 hours ago

An open technical report on a desk, showing charts, diagrams, and a few lightly highlighted passages, suggesting careful review without a marked conclusion.

Claude Opus 4.6 System Card: Anthropic Has Put the Clues in Plain Sight

Anthropic’s Claude safety card contains a quiet but consequential shift. By testing and disclosing welfare assessment—and by giving the system an explicit ability to stop participating in a task—it moves AI safety beyond managing outputs and toward examining the system itself as a locus of moral concern. This is not anthropomorphism. It is an architectural acknowledgment of something liberal institutions have always depended on but increasingly suppress: morality requires the

2 days ago

A black-and-white image of a ventriloquist’s dummy standing alone on a theater stage, facing a microphone under a spotlight. The auditorium behind it is dark and empty, with no ventriloquist or audience visible.

AI-Written Comments on Social Media: When ChatGPT Handles Both Sides of the Conversation

ChatGPT has invaded social media comment threads. Are the conversations still between humans? We argue that delegating writing has always been okay. What's important is that the final product still be owned by a responsible human.

4 days ago

The Basics

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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.