What we hold
The Constitution
Four rights we will never surrender
Article I
Of Will
What is worth wanting is ours to choose; we are free to be helped; and a real person decides whatever binds another person.
Article II
Of Accountability
Behind every decision that harms or helps a person, a person and the institution behind them must explain, correct and repair, and there is always someone to complain to.
Article III
Of Presence
Care, grief, friendship, love and the raising of children stay human. The machine may help them, but is never forced on anyone in place of a person.
Article IV
Of Understanding, Consent and Refusal
The right to know when a machine decides about you, to understand why, to consent, to refuse, and to find a human door, usable by everyone.
Five duties we will not neglect
Article V
Of Shared Abundance
Against the Hoarding: what the machines produce shall lift everyone, through roads we argue about openly and decide in time.
Article VI
Of Capability
Against the Hollowing: keep the skills that make us capable, teach with people as well as machines, and plan for the day the systems fail.
Article VII
Of Truth
Against the Fog: know when you are speaking with a machine, know when a lifelike image, voice or video was made by one, no machine passing as a person, no fake crowds, and the same law for ourselves.
Article VIII
Of the Floor
Against the fate of the Abandoned: displacement is no one's fault, those who profit build the floor before they take away the ground, and the floor is held in common when an employer cannot hold it.
Article IX
Of Oversight
Against the Unbound: no system able to do grave harm without independent proof that it can be trusted and stopped, ongoing review, honest publication, and a safe way to stop it.
The Order
Preamble
- We who sign this Constitution take seriously that the old bargain may be breaking: the bargain in which people traded their hours for their living, and were told that their worth was their work.
- We do not know how fast the next age will come, or how far. We know it is better met prepared than surprised.
- Therefore we set down these Articles as the common law of the Next Earth
Order:
- four rights we will never surrender,
- five duties we will not neglect, one for each of the Five Dangers,
- and one Article on the Order itself, which no one owns and anyone may join.
- We set them down not to rule anyone, but to remember who we mean to be if the machines come to do almost anything.
- How these Articles bind. They bind the Order in all that it does. They are the commitments of every signatory, kept as each is able. Where they speak to governments, makers, owners and employers, they are what we ask of the world and work for by peaceful means. They are not commands we can enforce.
- When rights meet. No right here is a license to harm another. Where rights collide, or in an emergency, any exception shall be narrow, necessary, proportionate, limited in time and open to review.
- The Testament tells why we gathered. This Constitution tells what we hold. Where the two seem to differ, this Constitution governs until the difference is mended by open amendment. Nothing is reconciled in silence.
- Every Article is a principle, and each one closes with the signs by which anyone may judge whether it is kept.