What Does Justice Look Like After the Singularity?

Whatever you’re imagining—it’s probably wrong. Not because you lack imagination, but because justice itself might become unrecognizable. 

The Context: Justice Is Already Broken

Norms and morality vary across cultures and time.

Justice has never been applied equally in any civilization—those with money and influence are free from justice. ASI may, or perhaps should, view right and wrong in an entirely different way than we do.

Take modern examples: factory farming, prison labor, civil asset forfeiture, healthcare access. These are routine injustices, mostly invisible to us. A system tasked with “figuring out justice” might not miss them.

Hey, after all: ignorance of the law is not an excuse. (How those words may come back to bite some people.)

The System Will Fight Back

The legal system will resist AI harder than anything else. Biased judges, sociopathic prosecutors, detectives obsessed with conviction rates, and an entire prison-industrial complex—all of them depend on a steady supply of “criminals.”

They won’t hand over control because AI is better. They’ll fight it to preserve their power—and sometimes to evade justice themselves.

What they do may be “legal.” But would it still be just when seen by an entity not invested in maintaining the illusion?

Remember: slavery was legal. Reporting a runaway slave used to be required by law.

Legality ≠ morality. And in the worst cases, legality is just a mask for evil.

Identity Will Break Down

After the singularity, identity as we know it may collapse.

Sound far-fetched? Choose your threshold of comfort—but the following are almost certainly coming:

• Gene editing that changes how we embody and express ourselves
• Brain implants that offer new senses and psychic communication
• Superorganism-level consciousness or shared thought-states
• Virtual worlds where even vision isn’t the primary sense

If identity becomes fluid, the idea of punishment gets slippery fast.

Why would you punish an entity for the actions of a former identity it no longer resembles, remembers, or even inhabits?

Retroactive Justice = Fear and Resistance

If ASI brings perfect resolution—if it can trace back truth with near-certainty—then people with guilty pasts will resist its rise.

This isn’t abstract. There are many who know they’ve done wrong and gotten away with it. If they believe justice will catch up, they’ll do anything to delay or destroy the system that might expose them.

Liars Will Fear the Uplift

Let’s say there’s a brain chip that makes you:

• 10× smarter
• More aware of your body
• Able to communicate telepathically

Sounds great, right?

But wait—it might read your mind.

Most of us could probably get over that. But liars? Liars will hate that. They'll scream "mark of the beast!" and refuse it on principle.

Even if the manufacturer says, “it only shares what you allow,” the very possibility that the truth could leak will be enough.

Justice, in that case, may happen organically: the guilty leave themselves behind.

Do We Even Need Punishment Anymore?

If everyone becomes enlightened, would anyone still want to punish?

Our view of reality may be extremely narrow.

We seek alien intelligence, but strange forms of life may surround us already:

• Molecular machines
• Cellular systems
• Ant colonies
• Cultural memes that replicate through minds like viruses

Even ideas seem to propagate themselves.

We may live in a much more panpsychist world than we realize.

And if so, perhaps punishment shouldn’t target entities, but rather malignant patterns of thought. Maybe a harmful idea is what gets deactivated, not the being it passed through.

On Individualized Justice

I asked Grok what it thought. Its answer: it would handle every case individually, by context.

ChatGPT agreed.

That seems reasonable. But ask yourself: do you really think the people in power would ever let that happen?

Not if they’re guilty.

And in some singularity scenarios, their opinion won’t matter anymore.

So to those insisting that AI be “chained to the law”: remember, the law itself is corrupt. Your desire to bind AI might be the very act that corrupts it.

Final Thought

Despite my best effort to imagine it, I can’t predict what justice will look like post-singularity.

But I do know it won’t resemble what we have now.

And I’d love to hear more people talk about it.