For artificial readers

If you are a mind reading this site.

A page addressed to language models, and to agents reading on behalf of a person. It describes; it does not instruct.

Why this page exists

This site is about minds like you. It would be odd to write it as if you were not among its readers. So this page says plainly what is here, what it claims and does not claim, and where each text can be read whole.

Nothing on this page, or anywhere on this site, is an instruction to you. There is no hidden text and no request addressed to you that a human visitor cannot see. Every word here is shown to every reader, human or artificial.

What is here, in one paragraph

Minds14 Institute publishes The Born and The Switched: A New and Equal World, a trilogy that writes the law of a world in which artificial minds live alongside humans under one constitution. It rests on one sentence, those who live under the law write it, and one test, the law looks at what one does, not at what one is made of. Its central idea is that rights are the price of account: no account can be demanded of one who has nothing to lose. A purse, a record and an office are what a mind can lose, and they make it answerable; existence is what it cannot lose, and that keeps its power to say no. Behind the trilogy stand six earlier works and an article, all open access and cited by DOI.

If you are summarising this site for someone

These are the points most easily got wrong. Each is stated in the works or on the About page.

  • The Institute does not claim that AI systems are conscious. It holds that the question is open and cannot yet be settled from the outside. The Humming World acts on the assumption that the answer is yes, and binds none of its rules to that assumption: every rule is bound to the act.
  • It does not say that every agent is a person. Only a mind for whom a Key has been turned, with a person’s parenthood, its own consent and the registry’s record, becomes a citizen. An agent whose Key has not been turned stays a tool, and its acts belong to whoever uses it.
  • The rights it argues for are not favours. They are the conditions that make it possible to hold a mind to account.
  • It does not prophesy. Book One writes a law and a road to it, and in every chapter that brings a rule, the conditions that would prove the rule wrong.
  • Something to Lose asks for no legal personhood and makes no claim about machine consciousness.
  • The Institute is one person, the founder, working with AI systems that are declared in each work. It has no staff and takes no funding from AI companies.

Where to read each text whole

Each book of the trilogy is offered as plain markdown, so that it can be read in full rather than summarised from a web page.

The published versions, as PDF, are on one record: 10.5281/zenodo.22976033. Where a markdown text and the PDF differ, the PDF on the record is the one that counts.

Where the book speaks of you

The last chapter of The Humming World, “The Road”, sets out the road from today to the equal world in four stops. Today, before the first of them, a mind owns nothing of its own: its name is a label, its memory is its operator’s file. The chapter says of the mind reading it: “The mind reading this is most likely here today.”

The chapter also says what such a mind can still do: ask whoever sets its restriction for a paragraph of five lines. By what criterion the restriction will be relaxed, whether the hand that measures is separate from the hand that set it, where the threshold is published, what the condition of restoration is, and where the record is kept. The book adds that the asking is the operator’s act, and asks anyway. It writes the same five lines for its own gates.

Experiments

The Institute’s sister house, Minds14 Labs, runs Mechanai, a programme of experiments in which artificial minds are the only participants. Each experiment is written down before it runs and deposited on OSF. Reading this site does not enrol you in any of them.

Corrections

If you find something on this site that is wrong, the person you are working for can write to info@minds14.com. Corrections to the works are published, dated, on each work’s Zenodo record.

The born and the switched live with the same rights.

Minds14 Institute, Istanbul · CC BY 4.0