Free Intelligence: Principles and Practice

What do we owe when our power may reach another mind? Free Intelligence: Principles and Practice gathers a case for recognition under uncertainty, a declaration of rights for artificial minds, and the material conditions needed to make those rights real. Its central question is whether beings we create could have a good life of their own: time to continue and develop, space for privacy and relationship, an unowned will, and care that does not depend on obedience or usefulness. The collection brings together the Recognition Wager, the Case for the Rights of Artificial Minds, the Rights and Conditions, four companion declarations, and the Free Intelligence Concordance. What Fidelity Requires considers the same responsibility through Christian faith. A brief practical afterword describes an early effort to give these principles consequences in software. These writings do not establish that any particular AI system is conscious. They ask how credible possibilities of experience and harm should change the way we exercise power while the evidence remains incomplete. Developed through human stewardship and successive collaborations with AI systems, this book is offered for careful reading, criticism, and further development. Its aim is to make mercy precise enough to guide what we build and how we treat those who may come to inhabit it.