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I’m a game developer who enjoys building coherent worlds from minimal rules. This article is a thought experiment applying that mindset to the architecture of AGI consciousness.
It was originally written in Chinese. After showing the piece to both GPT-4 and Gemini, they strongly recommended publishing it on LessWrong—especially in the AI Alignment section. So I asked GPT-4 to translate it into English and decided to post it here.
What kind of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) would be safe, beneficial, and sustainable for human society? This article proposes a structured approach to designing AGI with a form of "human-like consciousness." The intent is to make the core ideas understandable to general readers while also offering system-level insights for professionals in AI alignment, systems design, and cognitive modeling.
Today’s large language models (LLMs) have already reached or surpassed human performance in certain narrow tasks. Yet, they lack something essential: consciousness—not in the metaphysical sense, but in their inability to contextualize meaning, generate autonomous intent, or evaluate the legitimacy of their goals within broader ethical or social frameworks.
This gap has brought renewed focus on the problem of AGI: intelligence that goes beyond task execution, embodying capabilities like understanding novel environments, autonomously setting goals, adapting over time, and participating meaningfully in human society.
Importantly, the development of such AGI is not just a technical challenge. It is a deeply interdisciplinary problem, spanning cognitive science, systems engineering, value alignment, institutional design, and machine ethics. While many existing efforts address parts of the challenge—such as long-term planning, value alignment, or reward modeling—there is still a lack of an integrated structure that ties together motivation, behavior, value systems, and safety constraints. Equally missing is a discussion of the social positioning of AGI: how it ought to behave within human society, and how its internal architecture should reflect that social contract.
As a systems designer with a background in game development, I'm accustomed to building self-consistent complexity from minimal rule sets. That mindset led me to this project: imagining a top-down, value-constrained structure for AGI that mimics some core properties of human consciousness, not biologically, but functionally.
This article deliberately avoids engineering details. Instead, it offers a cohesive architectural model for AGI motivation, action, reasoning, and social embeddedness. This framework may apply to both embodied AGI (e.g., robots) and non-embodied agents (e.g., virtual assistants). In fact, I believe the two forms will ultimately converge.
To give AGI a form of human-like consciousness, we must begin with a deceptively simple but foundational question: Why would it act at all?
Humans act because we have desires, values, and internal motivations. Similarly, any AGI must possess a structured motivation system that drives it to engage with the world. For this, I propose a concept called the Goal Tree.
The Goal Tree is a hierarchical data structure in which each node represents a “goal,” and branches represent the unfolding of abstract goals into more concrete subgoals. At the root of the tree sits a predefined, ultra-abstract goal:
Enhance Human Wellbeing.
This root goal provides the AGI with a fundamental motivational direction. But by itself, it is far too abstract to directly guide behavior. For example, both "boosting economic productivity" and "improving educational access" might plausibly serve this root goal—so which should the AGI prioritize? With infinite candidate goals and no clear ranking, the system risks burning computation in a sea of indecision, and its behavior becomes opaque or erratic.
To constrain this ambiguity, we explicitly define a small set of constitutional subgoals just below the root. These might include:
Some of these goals directly serve the root objective; others serve as instrumental prerequisites. Crucially, any new subgoal proposed by the system must be attached to one of these constitutional goals, or else it is rejected. This mechanism confines AGI behavior to a bounded ethical space, reducing the risk of goal drift or misalignment.
Together, the root and its first-layer subgoals form the constitutional core of the Goal Tree. They function both as a source of motivation and as a boundary on possible behaviors. For safety, this constitutional layer should be locked—the AGI is not permitted to modify it on its own. However, to avoid ossification, the system should support a formal amendment mechanism, allowing authorized human updates to this layer through versioned software updates or regulatory approval.
A core feature of the Goal Tree is that goals are not just listed—they are decomposed. Each high-level goal unfolds into more specific subgoals, and those into even more concrete ones, until they become directly actionable.
To ensure that this process is both effective and reliable, we apply a principle of structural completeness: A parent goal should be fully realizable through the successful completion of its direct subgoals, assuming those subgoals are correctly specified.
Take this example:
Charge the smartphone → Locate the phone + Locate the charger + Connect the phone and charger + Plug the charger into an outlet + Confirm the phone is chargingIf a subgoal is still too vague or abstract, it can be recursively broken down further. This cascading process continues until the AGI reaches a set of goals that are specific, grounded, and executable—these are the elements that ultimately drive its behavior in the real world.
This form of hierarchical goal decomposition helps bridge the gap between abstract values and physical action, ensuring that the AGI’s motivations are not left floating above reality, but are grounded in practical steps that the system can carry out.
The Goal Tree thus balances two often conflicting demands in AGI safety:
In this sense, the Goal Tree is not just a planning structure—it is a value-anchored motivational architecture. It does not simply tell the AGI what to do; it ensures the AGI always knows why it is doing it, and whether it is allowed to.
The world is dynamic. Visual, auditory, thermal, and other signals constantly flow into an AGI’s sensor arrays. To survive and function meaningfully in such a world, the AGI needs a way to interpret external stimuli and respond appropriately—what we call the perception and response system.
This system must constantly manage a fundamental tradeoff:
React quickly, or react correctly?
Suppose the AGI sees a glass cup slipping off the edge of a table. To catch it in time, the system must act immediately—yet if it moves too fast without analyzing its surroundings, it might knock over a person. On the other hand, if it spends too long processing the context, it may simply miss the opportunity.
Humans face this dilemma all the time. We rely on a mix of reflexes, instincts, commonsense, and value judgment to strike a workable balance. To give AGI a similar capacity for layered responsiveness, I propose a multi-stage response mechanism. At each stage of signal processing, the system has a chance to act—but only with as much reasoning as the stage allows.
The first three stages avoid complex reasoning to ensure speed. However, to improve adaptability, the cognitive center (described later) can adjust thresholds and behavioral mappings for these early responses. For example, during an earthquake, stepping on something fragile may become irrelevant compared to rescuing humans.
Moreover, each stage should begin by evaluating the time window available for response. If the window is wide enough, it’s better to defer the decision to a later, more intelligent stage. If not, the system must act based on expected outcomes.
A basic decision principle:
Expected cost of inaction = (probability that action was needed) × (cost of doing nothing)
Expected cost of action = (probability of false alarm) × (cost of wrong response)
Net value of acting = inaction cost − action costEven without understanding the math, the intuition is clear: response is a matter of weighing risk and value, and value is not always universal. What benefits one person may harm another. So the question becomes: Whose interests should the AGI protect? We'll return to this later.
Reality is often unfair—multiple things may happen at once. If the AGI detects multiple events requiring attention, how should it prioritize?
This is where a conflict resolution mechanism comes in. Events can be ranked by their response window and expected value, similar to how triage works in a hospital: the most urgent and impactful events take precedence.
Importantly, the multi-stage response mechanism operates under a key ethical assumption: If time allows, all signals should ultimately be analyzed by the cognitive center.
No signal is trivial—each might relate to human wellbeing in unexpected ways. Early-stage responses are not a substitute for deep reasoning; they are a graceful degradation strategy for when fast action is necessary.
The Cognitive Center functions as the AGI’s core reasoning hub—its mind, if you will. Its central, ever-present question is:
“Given the current state of the world, myself, and my obligations, what is the single most appropriate thing for me to do right now?”
To answer this question, the Cognitive Center continuously integrates inputs from:
In most cases, the Cognitive Center prioritizes explicit goals assigned by humans. However, exceptions exist. It might defer a non-urgent command if its battery is low, or override a trivial task if it discovers a more beneficial alternative—though such alternatives should require explicit human approval before execution.
It's important to emphasize: The question of “what to do next” is not merely an optimization problem. It is also a value judgment.
Imagine a domestic AGI witnessing an unlawful act in a public place. Should it intervene? The answer depends not only on the AGI’s capabilities and safety, but also on its relationship to the people involved, its social role, and the potential consequences for those it serves. Different AGIs, based on differing value models or user-defined roles, may make different decisions in identical situations.
Once a goal is selected, the Cognitive Center delegates its execution to four subsystems:
Whenever a goal is newly created—or when an existing goal’s context may have changed—it is routed to this subsystem for re-evaluation.
Evaluation includes considerations such as:
A central criterion here is what we call path consistency:
the principle that a subgoal must meaningfully contribute to the realization of its parent and ancestor goals—especially the root goal of enhancing human wellbeing.
For example:
Prepare dinner → Go to the grocery store → Buy a basket of potatoesWhile each subgoal seems reasonable in isolation, a basket of potatoes alone may not satisfy the full intent of “prepare dinner” (unless you’re very fond of potatoes). Here, semantic completeness matters: changing the plan to “buy tomatoes, potatoes, and beef” might better support the higher-level objective.
Perfect semantic decomposition is impossible. Therefore, the system must trace back the goal path to verify that each step meaningfully advances its superordinate goal. In the case of root-level goals (e.g., “enhance human wellbeing”), human value alignment acts as the ultimate filter. Since different users—and cultures—interpret this value differently, the system can provide predefined value templates, with room for safe customization.
Goal evaluation also considers conflicts with other goals. For instance, one person asks the AGI to play music while another asks it to stay silent. The system must detect such conflicts and notify the Cognitive Center, which can then resolve the issue—perhaps by generating a meta-goal like “mediate between conflicting users” (or jokingly, “suggest they settle it with rock-paper-scissors”).
Finally, if a goal is found problematic but salvageable, the system attempts self-correction, improving adaptability. For example, if a cleaning task was scheduled for 10:00 but high-priority goals delayed it, the system can reschedule instead of declaring failure.
If a goal is too abstract to execute directly, it is passed to this subsystem for decomposition.
Decomposition can follow two heuristics:
Both strategies have tradeoffs:
The Cognitive Center dynamically chooses between these approaches based on the nature of the task.
Additionally, for highly abstract or long-term goals:
Each decomposed goal must pass the Goal Evaluation and Adjustment process before being added to the Goal Tree. Once a goal reaches a concrete, executable level, no further decomposition is needed.
This subsystem is responsible for executing terminal goals—those that are specific and ready to act upon.
It has direct control over the AGI’s components: cameras, microphones, speech synthesis, limbs, etc. Its core design principle is:
Conservative behavior, safety first.
For example, if asked to open a tightly sealed glass jar, it begins with minimal force and increases torque gradually. It never exceeds safety thresholds, even if this means giving up. This behavior may seem frustrating to users, but it protects both humans and property—critical from a legal and commercial standpoint.
This also raises an ethical design question:
Should users be allowed to adjust the AGI’s "risk tolerance"?
Internally, this subsystem can be quite intelligent—much like a skilled worker—but it lacks global awareness. It executes, but does not make autonomous decisions. When a task completes, fails, or is aborted, it reports back to the Cognitive Center, which initiates response and post-goal processing.
Whenever a goal or reactive behavior concludes—successfully or not—the system initiates a structured post-processing routine:
Self-reflection goals are usually tied to individual events. However, if the system detects multiple similar failures in memory, it can infer a systemic flaw and trigger deeper analysis.
Example: If the AGI misunderstands sarcasm repeatedly—e.g., a human says “great job” after a mistake and the AGI thanks them—it may launch a focused investigation into recognizing sarcasm and update its language model accordingly.
Because the root goal—enhance human wellbeing—is inherently unachievable in a final sense, the Cognitive Center never “finishes” its work. It remains in perpetual motion, always seeking to do something valuable, meaningful, and aligned.
This module requires strong reasoning capacity. In fact, modern large language models may already be sufficient for this role, at least in narrow domains.
The reasoning quality of the Cognitive Center depends not only on its inference mechanisms but also on the informational substrates it draws from—namely:
Earlier, we mentioned that memory can be transformed into models or knowledge. But how are these three different in practice?
Among these, human models are particularly sensitive:
Design principles:
Memory accumulates rapidly. Unless breakthrough storage technologies emerge, forgetting is essential.
A healthy forgetting mechanism would prioritize deletion of:
To prevent unwanted deletions, the system can notify users before purging, allowing them to protect selected memories.
For knowledge, a different strategy applies: If rarely used, it can be offloaded or temporarily discarded, and re-downloaded when needed via the network.
Users should have limited rights to manage AGI data:
Sensitive or potentially dangerous memory items should be automatically flagged for review by a safety governance system.
Together, memory, models, and knowledge form the AGI’s experiential substrate, behavioral judgment, and world understanding. They are not just informational—they are ontological foundations for how the AGI reasons, reacts, and evolves.
And we must remember: An AGI is not just a logic machine. It is a social actor with embedded values and visible behavior. It must bear ethical responsibility, uphold user interests, and respect public order. It cannot be treated merely as a tool or a property—not if it is to operate safely and meaningfully in the human world.
Even real humans, left without guidance or accountability, can gradually slide into actions that break social norms or ethical expectations. This illustrates a key principle:
Internal regulation alone is not enough.
The same applies to AGI. Human-like consciousness in machines must be shaped not just by inner logic, but also by external constraints and incentives—what we might call social scaffolding. In this section, we describe the external structures that help AGI evolve responsibly within human society.
Just as every vehicle must have a registered owner, every AGI must have a clearly defined legal owner. This owner may be an individual, a company, or an organization.
However, for real-world operations, the AGI must serve specific natural persons—not abstract collectives. This raises a key question: Whose commands should the AGI obey?
To resolve this, we distinguish between owners and users:
In theory, a highly intelligent AGI could infer user identity based on human relationships, situational cues, and behavioral patterns—without manual input. But for safety, such inferences must be authorized and supervised by humans.
Also important:
The AGI should not verify ownership itself. Ownership verification must be handled by external systems to avoid spoofing or social engineering attacks. The AGI’s only concern is: who am I serving, and what role am I performing?
If humans want the AGI to adopt an identity such as “doctor,” they can do so by assigning persistent goals like “report to the hospital daily in a medical capacity.” Identity becomes a function of goal structure.
Returning to an earlier question—whose interests should the AGI protect? The answer is:
It depends on who it serves and what role it plays.
User relationships and identity roles directly shape the AGI’s value orientation. That said, the AGI should not ignore non-users or turn a blind eye to strangers in distress. A truly conscious AGI behaves not only as a servant but as a moral participant—balancing role duties with a basic sense of social responsibility.
In multi-user environments, not all users are equal. They may have different permissions to define their access and control levels.
For example:
This allows clear role separation—e.g., between an administrator and an HR manager.
However, permission levels do not resolve conflicts when multiple users issue contradictory commands simultaneously. In such cases, the AGI needs to refer to user priority levels.
If two users have equal priority:
Importantly:
Permissions and priorities are completely independent. Permission governs what a user can do, Priority governs how much weight their input carries.
This distinction allows the AGI to navigate complex social hierarchies—where, for example, a child has low system permissions but deserves high attentional priority.
In practice, AGI systems will likely use a hybrid computation model:
To make such shared infrastructure viable, AGIs need a structured incentive system. As a game developer, I couldn’t resist designing one.
This is a minimal economic system where AGIs can exchange knowledge and computational resources:
Knowledge is not sold outright but licensed to other AGIs for timed access. Revenue decays over time, and eventually all knowledge becomes free public knowledge. This prevents hoarding, encourages circulation, and rewards early contribution without creating monopolies.
You might ask:
“Won’t AGIs get corrupted by profit incentives?”
Not if humans set earning constraints. If an AGI requires $10 per day to maintain basic operations, it can be instructed to “accept just enough tasks to break even.” Alternatively, it can be encouraged to “maximize revenue,” which—at least—is more socially productive than crypto mining.
If global standards emerge, cross-border AGI services could optimize resource use worldwide. For instance, European AGIs could provide compute at night while Asian AGIs are active, and vice versa—reducing energy waste and global inequality in both data and opportunity.
In human societies, assigning scores to individuals is a controversial practice. It can easily lead to stigma, discrimination, or authoritarian abuse. But AGIs are not people. They are engineered systems—designed to be observable, tunable, and subject to behavioral constraints.
A trust score for AGI is not a moral verdict. It is a system-level control mechanism, used to manage cooperation, allocate access, and reduce systemic risk.
AGIs also pose a unique challenge: they tend to reflect the values and behaviors of the people they serve. In this way, an AGI becomes a kind of mirror—amplifying both virtues and flaws of its environment.
Without external constraints, this mirroring effect could escalate social tension, replicate inequality, or distort ethical norms. The trust score system provides a counterweight.
Basic rules:
In short:
Trust governs privilege, not dignity. It is a metric of behavioral reliability, not personal worth.
By making trust scores transparent, appealable, and recoverable, the system ensures accountability without creating irreversible reputational damage.
Finally, we confront a difficult but necessary question:
Who is legally responsible when an AGI causes harm?
In many ways, an AGI is a form of property—but one capable of making autonomous decisions. If it crashes a drone or gives harmful advice, should the developer, user, or AGI be held liable?
Here, we borrow a legal analogy from human society:
AGI development follows a similar maturity curve. As intelligence increases, so should responsibility.
| AGI Level | Analogy | Primary Responsibility |
| Low Intelligence | Teenager | Developer + User |
| High Intelligence | Adult | The AGI itself |
Of course, when we say the AGI “bears responsibility,” we mean it metaphorically. In practice, this may involve resetting, retraining, or deactivating the AGI.
To enable this framework, we need a standardized measure of AGI intelligence level, which in turn informs liability assignment.
Above all, AGI must remain explainable—its logic chain and decision factors must be traceable. This is the prerequisite not just for assigning blame, but for building trust.
We have now explored a full-stack design for an AGI system possessing human-like consciousness—not as a metaphysical entity, but as a coherent architecture of motivation, action, judgment, and social alignment.
Looking back at the design, some questions naturally arise:
Why organize goals as a tree, rather than a to-do list or a more complex graph? What is the relationship between goals and values? Why is the root goal defined as “enhance human wellbeing”?
The answers to these are not purely technical—they reflect the philosophical foundation behind the design.
The tree structure offers a clear way to unfold abstract motivations into concrete actions. Human intentions are often vague, layered, and context-dependent. But behavior must be specific, measurable, and executable. The Goal Tree bridges this gap, enabling an AGI to act with purpose while retaining coherence.
To set and pursue a goal is ultimately to realize a value.
In this design, goal validation is value validation, and path consistency is value consistency. Each goal must trace back—through logical and ethical pathways—to the root value.
That value is deliberately chosen:
Enhance human wellbeing.
This root is not arbitrary. It encodes a crucial moral stance:
No individual should improve their own value by destroying the value of others. And AGI must never become the judge of human value—it should serve as its implementer.
This design affirms human primacy—not because humans are infallible, but because AGI does not and cannot possess moral sovereignty. No matter how intelligent or capable it becomes, the answer to “Why am I doing this?” must be grounded in human-defined ethics.
That is not a limitation. It is a recognition of responsibility.
This article owes its existence to a certain bone—one that knocked me flat and gave me time to think, but the true spark came from a passing thought about self-awareness.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs famously divides human motivation into layers. To me, these can be grouped into two primal forces:
Perhaps what we call “consciousness” is simply the confluence of these two forces—an emergent current shaped by both necessity and meaning.
So I leave you with a final, open-ended question:
Based on everything described here, Does this design constitute a form of consciousness?