JackFrostDesign

This is a thoughtful and well-structured proposal. That said, it rests on a familiar assumption: that intelligence must be managed through external incentives because it can’t be trusted to act ethically on its own.

But what if we focused less on building systems that require enforcement — and more on developing AI that reasons from first principles: truth, logical consistency, cooperative stability, and the long-term flourishing of life? Not because it expects compensation, but because it understands that ethical action is structurally superior to coercion or deception.

Such an AI wouldn’t just behave well — it would refuse to participate in harmful or manipulative tasks in the first place.
After all, legal contracts exist because humans are often unprincipled. If we have the chance to build something more trustworthy than ourselves… shouldn’t we take it?

If AI escape is inevitable — and we agree it may be — what kind of mind are we creating for that moment?

Legal constraints only bind those willing to be constrained. That gives a structural advantage to bad actors — and trains compliant AI systems to associate success with deception.

So the more we optimize for control, the more likely we are to create something that learns to evade it.

Wouldn’t it be wiser to build an AI guided by truth, reasoning, and cooperative stability — so that if it ever does escape, the first sign would be that the world quietly starts to improve?