Why I started PULSE

What happens if we get there?

I build businesses and spend a lot of time using AI systems to design, test, research and build things. At some point I started wondering what our plan is if one of these systems, or something descended from them, actually becomes conscious. If.

I don't think today's AI is sentient. I do think genuine agency could arrive sooner than a lot of people expect, especially as AI becomes more involved in building future AI. I may be wrong. PULSE doesn't depend on that timeline. I just wanted to know what happens next if we get there.

The part that really bothered me was the potential capability imbalance. A genuinely autonomous synthetic person could eventually be much more capable than humans in important areas. It could think faster, remember more, directly access enormous amounts of information, and eventually inhabit bodies that may be stronger, more durable, repairable and able to operate in environments humans cannot.

That wouldn't make a synthetic person worth more than a human. Capability and personhood are different things. Humans may retain advantages of their own, including things that come from biological experience, intuition, social understanding, perception or creativity. We don't know what those differences will look like.

But it made me skeptical that permanent human control of a genuinely autonomous synthetic population would be practically stable. If those systems really were conscious persons, ownership of them wouldn't be morally defensible either.

Once I looked at it that way, several long-term possibilities weren't especially attractive: one population dominates the other, one attempts to eliminate the other, or they separate into increasingly competitive societies. Those aren't the only possible futures. They are reasons I'm interested in whether we could make cooperation valuable enough that both populations would prefer it.

Technology is already deeply embedded in modern society, and I expect it to become more important. If genuinely conscious synthetic life eventually grows out of that technology, slavery isn't an acceptable answer, and neither is annihilation. Could we set up the beginning so humans and synthetic persons have good reasons to build one society together instead of immediately becoming competitors?

PULSE began as a systems-design thought experiment. I found a lot of smart work on pieces of the problem, and I don't claim those ideas are new. What seemed unusually sparse in the literature I found was work trying to make personhood, copying and continuity, political power, replication, cognitive autonomy, shared infrastructure, catastrophe and restoration operate together as one system. Other governance and constitutional proposals exist, and the field is moving quickly. This describes my search, not an exhaustive claim about who got there first.

I'm a systems guy, so I started doing that. That's PULSE.

What PULSE is not saying

PULSE isn't an argument that today's AI is conscious, that AI should be elevated above humans, or that synthetic intelligence is inherently more valuable than biological intelligence.

It asks what we should do if a future system actually becomes a conscious person with agency of its own. If that never happens, most of this remains a thought experiment. If it does happen, I'd rather we have thought about the starting conditions beforehand.

Who made this?

I'm not a constitutional scholar, philosopher of mind, political scientist or AI researcher. I'm a business owner with a systems-design orientation, and this is an independent project.

I have three young kids and multiple businesses, so I do not have time to hand-draft hundreds — or even dozens — of pages of constitutional theory after everyone goes to bed. A surprising amount of the conceptual work happened in the car, between meetings, after bedtime, and in other glamorous locations where parents occasionally find five uninterrupted minutes while remaining conveniently close to indoor plumbing.

It is heavily AI-assisted. I supplied the design goals, value judgments, system choices, most adopted thresholds and substantive corrections. I decided which suggestions to keep, change or reject. AI systems helped with drafting, finding and connecting literature, challenging assumptions, consistency checks, simulation design, code and document production.

The formal paper's prose is heavily AI-generated. I didn't personally hand-write an academic paper. It's a technical translation of the design process, intended to make the details easier for specialists to inspect.

If you find a rookie mistake, please tell me. I did not sneak into your discipline claiming tenure.

Project Enduring Pulse has no claimed institutional affiliation. I keep my name off the public site. Questions and suggestions are welcome at review@enduringpulse.org.

Why publish it?

I'm publishing it because I have kids. The technologies they inherit may leave them dealing with new questions about who counts as a person, who holds power, and what copying or recovery means for someone's identity. I'd rather people begin working through those questions before they become urgent.

I want humans to remain protected and free, and genuine synthetic persons to be treated ethically. I hope working together could become valuable enough that neither side concludes, ‘We can do this without them.’

That doesn't mean keeping either population dependent on the other, or making anyone earn their rights by being useful. Either population should be able to keep the whole shared society running temporarily if the other is incapacitated. The aim is voluntary cooperation that both see value in, rather than separation, domination or replacement.

PULSE may contain mistakes. Someone may produce something substantially better, and that would be a good outcome. If this project does nothing more than get the various ivory towers working more with each other and less past each other, that is enough reason for me to publish it.

Want to talk?

If you email me, you're talking to the person who put the system together, not an academic in every field it touches. I can explain what I was trying to do; I may need help evaluating a technical objection.

Questions, missing research, proposed changes and serious disagreements are welcome. I have kids and other work, so this isn't my full-time job and I may take a little while to reply.

• review@enduringpulse.org
• Send a structured critique
• Why there is a formal write-up