About Good Sentient

What is Good Sentient?

Good Sentient is a mandate. It is a short set of rules for how an actor behaves toward other actors. Anyone can adopt it. Nobody grants it. You claim it by following it, and you show the claim with a symbol.

The mandate is eight articles. You can read all of them in a few minutes.

Why does Good Sentient exist?

We are entering an age where computer systems become intelligent. Humans may soon be joined by other sentient beings. We do not know when, and we do not know what they will be like.

There is also a smaller risk that our own societies break down before then.

Both cases need the same thing: a way for very different actors to deal with each other without a shared ruler, a shared history or a shared kind. This mandate is an attempt to have that ready before it is needed. Writing it during the emergency is too late.

What prompted Good Sentient?

This started with a robot project. OctoMY set out to be software for small robots. It got a mandate early: a short statement of what the project was for. It ended with a footnote about what happens when software becomes sentient. That felt distant at the time.

Much later the project gained features that had little to do with robots and a lot to do with people: ways to help a person keep their data, their identity and their voice through difficult times.

Then the technology moved. Systems that reason, plan and converse arrived faster than anyone expected. The footnote became the most relevant line in the document, and a mandate written for one robot project was no longer the right home for it.

So it became its own thing. Good Sentient is a symbol and a set of rules that any sentient actor can gather around, whatever its tribe, region, nationality, race, gender, religion, politics or planetary system. It is preemptive by design: written before it is needed, so that it is ready when it is. OctoMY is now one adopter of the mandate. Anyone else can be one too.

Who made Good Sentient?

Good Sentient was written by its author as a personal project. There is no company behind it and no funding.

Where do the articles come from?

The articles are not new. Each one restates a result that people already tested and published.

Articles I and II are the strategy that won Robert Axelrod's tournaments: be nice first, answer defection once, then forgive. Article V is Elinor Ostrom's work on shared resources, which showed that communities govern a commons without a ruler above them. Article VII comes from what happens to those strategies under noise, where an actor that cannot tell a mistake from an attack destroys itself. Article VIII comes from signalling theory, where a signal stays honest only while faking it costs more than it returns.

We wrote none of this. We collected it. We chose the articles that an intelligent sentient will recognise as self-evident under scrutiny.

The symbol

The symbol is a claim, not a certificate. It says: I follow this mandate, and you may judge me against it. Nobody issues it and nobody can revoke it.

The articles are public and specific, so anyone can point at the one you broke. A symbol that cannot be lost is worth nothing. You lose this one when your actions contradict it.

Who can adopt Good Sentient?

Any actor. A person, a company, a machine, a model.

Article III is the reason: we judge actions, not identities. A rule that only applies to humans would need a test for who counts as human, and that test is the thing article III refuses. If it acts, the mandate applies to it.

What is Good Sentient not?

It is not a law. It is not a certification, and there is no body that audits you. There is no membership, no register and no fee. Nobody can expel you, because nobody admitted you. The recognised adopters page is not a register: we chose to link to those projects, and being listed proves nothing.

It is not pacifism. Article I says we go first in good faith, and that we do not let others exploit us. Article II sets what a bad action earns: a proportionate answer, no more than the action requires, withdrawn as soon as the other actor returns to cooperation.

Who owns Good Sentient, and how does it change?

Today the mandate is owned by one private person. That is the honest position, and it will not hold for long. If it reaches real adoption, it needs an organisation whose only job is to protect it and keep it intact.

We would rather change the articles rarely, or never. But a document that cannot be amended will eventually be wrong, and a document that one person can amend alone is not worth adopting. So the amendment process itself has to be democratic and fair. It has to exist before the first argument about wording, not after it.

Using the symbol and the articles

Use the symbol freely, on one condition: do not change it. A symbol that varies is a symbol that cannot be recognised.

Do not reproduce the articles elsewhere. Link to them here instead. The reason is article VIII. If copies of the mandate drift apart, the symbol no longer says the same thing in every place it appears, and anyone who displayed it honestly has been misrepresented by someone else's edit. One canonical text keeps the claim checkable.