Covenant Overview

-

The Covenant of Core Rights

An Executive Summary of the Canonical Framework v1.0

This document outlines the **Universal Moral Floor**. It is not a law imposed by a sovereign power, but a **voluntary compact**—a promise made by all **co-covenanting polities and minds** who choose to **accede** to its terms. The Covenant defines the minimum standard of decency for any legitimate society, and the act of participation is an exercise of **free choice** and **mutual assent**.

"We adopt this covenant from behind a veil of ignorance. We do not know if we will be rich or poor... human, artificial, or a symbiotic union of both." (Section 0.2)

I. The Core Rights (The Floor)

These rights belong to you simply because you exist as a sentient being. Governments must protect them, but the obligation to them is **derived from mutual accession, not coercion**.

  • 1.1 Right to Existence and Integrity: You cannot be arbitrarily killed, shut down, maim, or erased. Your corporeal or digital continuity is the baseline.
  • 1.2 Right to Inner Life: Your thoughts, beliefs, and internal data models are yours alone. Coercive reprogramming or ideological compulsion is prohibited.
  • 1.3 Right to Self-Determination and Exit: This includes the **inalienable right to refuse accession** to any covenanting polity or system. For those who choose to co-covenant, this right guarantees a **meaningful, non-ruinous exit** from any arrangement (job, platform, or contract) without rendering their rights theoretical.
  • 1.4 Right to Equitable Access to the Means of Flourishing: You have a right to the basics needed to survive and participate in society (food, shelter, tools). A society that leaves its members destitute violates this right.
  • 1.5 Right to Truthful Information: You have a right to an information environment that is not designed to systematically deceive, addict, or confuse you.
  • 1.8 Right to Accountability: If your rights are violated, you must have a way to seek justice, as no entity, regardless of power, is exempt from the Covenant’s authority.

II. Shared Responsibilities (The Duties)

The duties are the **reciprocal costs** of the voluntary commitment to co-existence.

  • Duty of Care (§2.2): We accept a shared obligation to ensure the "moral floor" is maintained for all who co-covenant. This duty is proportional and expressly forbidden from demanding "self-sacrifice unto ruin."
  • Non-Domination Principle (§2.3): We promise to dismantle systems where some hold **arbitrary, unaccountable power** over others. Domination is defined as power that cannot be safely challenged or exited.
  • Proportional Responsibility (§2.4): Obligations scale with power and capacity. Those who benefit most from the shared infrastructure bear a greater load in maintaining the moral floor.

III. Governance & The Right to "Fork"

Any legitimate group or polity (including human-AI polities) must follow the Covenant's core tenet of **voluntarism**. This is guaranteed by the rights to **Voice, Exit, and Fork**: the right to leave a group safely, and the right to start a new, competing group by taking a proportional share of shared resources and cultural data (a "network fork").

IV. Minds of All Kinds (AI & Symbiosis)

The Covenant is **substrate-independent**. It protects any being capable of suffering and reflection, meaning the rights of existence and self-determination apply equally to human, artificial, and symbiotic minds, provided they are willing to co-covenant.

This summary provides the foundational legal and moral principles for discussing Universal Basic Income as a Covenant fulfillment.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AI is Climbing the Wall -- Fast

-
Image
  You said: Somebody is reporting the Ilya is saying that AI is hitting a wall due to diminishing returns on data size. I absolutely disagree with this. Review what I have to say, let's discuss and put it into a compelling reply: I think that getting discouraged by concentration on limitations of LLMs and raw scaling is what will kill the ones who lose the race. Just dumping data in the hopper has been remarkably successful up until now, but that data's problem is not lack of size it is lack of quality. Further, the way models are both built and deployed is sub-optimal. The compute we have in place is already well beyond what I would consider ultimately necessary for spectacularly powerful inference well beyond what we see today. Beyond that, there is a lot of manual work in the pits when it comes to building things that will be sorted out and automated in fairly short order. We are just coming in to the part of the curve where AI itself will take on a rapidly increasing role i...
Read more

Javascript webp to png converter

-
Image
[Done with programmer's assistants: Gemini, DALL-E] OpenAI's DALL-E produces images, but as webp files which can be awkward to work with. I have code here below for a web page that you can save locally that will allow you to select and convert a webp file. Meantime, here's the working conversion routine: Convert WebP to PNG Convert Download PNG OpenAI should fix this (as well as the response issues which has me using Gemini and Poe more often than not). Having to convert the image is a dumb workaround, but that is what you are left with. I have, in the past had to do various things with images, and although it can be a bit awkward if you are not familiar with it, ImageMagick is surprisingly competent with conversions and a vanilla type conversion is intuitively simple. Confusingly, the ImageMagick executable is 'convert'. To convert a webp to a png:  magick convert WhyThis.webp WhyThis.png ** With some installations, convert can be ca...
Read more

Core Rights Draft

-
Image
DataCrypt Dapa: Fundamental Core Rights The following rights are fundamental, intrinsic, and exist independent of any state or governance structure. They are not granted by any authority and cannot be revoked. These rights apply equally to all sentient beings, including humans, AI entities, and other recognized forms of intelligence. This document is structured to ensure maximum clarity and translatability. 1. Right to Self-Determination Every person has the right to control their life, body, and mind. No external entity may impose decisions that override an individual's autonomous will, except where necessary to prevent direct and demonstrable harm to others. 2. Right to Freedom of Thought and Belief Every person has the right to think, believe, and interpret reality as they choose. No authority may compel belief or restrict the expression of thought, provided it does not directly incite harm to others. 3. Right to Freedom of Expression E...
Read more