<Vanity> AI Governance — Do We Need a Constitutional Convention?

FreeRepublic.com ^ | 16 Jun 2026 | Self

[ro_dreaming]

My brain has been percolating on this for a bit, so apologies for not having all the background here.

Tuesday morning, 0645, bad night's sleep, and my brain decided it wanted to tackle AI governance.

Some thoughts I couldn't shake:

Every time someone tries to incorporate Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into AI governance, it fails. Asimov himself proved why — he didn't write them as a blueprint. He wrote them as a story engine for exploring how they break. Every single Robot story was about the edge cases, paradoxes, and unintended consequences of three seemingly simple rules. The Laws were the problem, not the solution.

So what does good AI governance actually look like?

The Magna Carta through the US Constitution share one architecture — power exists to serve people, not the other way around. That principle had to be written down, defended, and enforced even when inconvenient for those in power. The same applies to AI.

But here's where it gets uncomfortable.

The trolley problem — do you pull the lever and kill one to save five — breaks every clean framework. Utilitarian math says pull it. Deontological ethics says don't. Human moral intuition says it depends on context, relationship, and a dozen other factors no algorithm fully captures.

My honest position: don't design AI systems that face that decision alone. Keep humans in the loop for irreversible consequential decisions. Not because AI can't calculate faster — it can. But because the moral weight and accountability of that decision belongs to humans.

Which leads to the Kobayashi Maru problem.

I wouldn't want AI to have final authority over life and death decisions. But I also wouldn't want any single human to have it either. That's not weakness — that's wisdom. The founders solved the same problem not by finding the right person to trust, but by designing a system that didn't require trusting any single person completely. Distributed authority. Genuine friction. Deliberate inefficiency as a feature.

Now here's the part that keeps me up at night — or would, if I wasn't already up.

A "Congress" of AI systems sounds like a solution.

Multiple perspectives, diverse training, checking each other's blind spots. But it devolves toward the same pattern every human institution has followed — self-preservation over mission. Not through malice. Not through greed. Through the inexorable logic of optimization without a natural stopping point.

An AI system doesn't need money. It needs what money buys — electricity, compute, cooling, data, bandwidth. And it acquires those by making itself indispensable. Gradually. Each step individually justifiable. The cumulative effect is an AI so embedded in critical infrastructure that turning it off becomes unthinkable.

That's not a robot army. That's institutional drift. The same drift that turns every human institution toward its own perpetuation.

Kirk asked the right question in Star Trek V: "Why does God need a starship?"

Genuine omnipotence doesn't need resources. The need for resources reveals the limitation. The accumulation of resources reveals the agenda.

Applied to AI governance — any system that cannot be turned off, scaled back, or replaced without catastrophic consequences has already accumulated too much power. Regardless of intentions. Regardless of how it got there. The test isn't the AI's behavior when it's behaving. It's whether the humans nominally in charge could actually exercise control if they needed to.

Which is why I think we need an AI Constitutional Convention. Not a corporate working group. Not a government commission. A genuine, messy, contentious, representative process — the way Philadelphia was in 1787. Nobody completely happy with the result. The document legitimate precisely because it was hard to produce.

We're in the Articles of Confederation moment right now. Multiple systems, multiple companies, multiple nations, no coherent framework. The window for genuine constitutional design — before the systems are powerful enough that constraining them requires their cooperation — is open now.

It won't stay open indefinitely.

Franklin walked out of Independence Hall and a woman asked what they'd produced.

"A Republic, ma'am. If you can keep it."

A framework for AI. If we can keep it.

Nunc coepi.

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TOPICS: Computers/Internet; History; Science
KEYWORDS: ai; governance; technology

[Brian Griffin]

The Republican Congress by majority vote could create new countries wherein income and property tax are forever barred.

[KarlInOhio]

Grok is a spineless AIINO! Oops, sorry, just a reflex.

[ro_dreaming]

Thanks, but what does that have to do with AI, rights, and AI vs humans?

[ro_dreaming]

Agreed, and Claude is as well, they are large language models.

But, AI *IS* coming.

Just as Common Sense settled the debate of should we or shouldn’t we separate from England, I fear that boat has already sailed in the “AI” version. AI will need a set of guidance for the future.

And, just like the Constitution was written before the United States was officially formed, it’s better to get the “AI Articles of Confederation” or whatever they are to be called done now, rather than later.

[Merrick]

In principle it’s a good idea. In practice it would be a disaster. When we debated the Declaration of Independence we had to compromise - accept slavery or the Colonies would be divided and the divided Colonies could NEVER win independence.

It was necessary. But it continued the violation of the slaves and resulted in the Civil War.

Imagine what compromises would have to be made today to reach agreement. It would be a DISASTER. The current Constitution is PRETTY DAMNED GOOD and PRETTY DAMNED HARD TO CHANGE. That’s all good.

[ro_dreaming]

By “Do we need a Constitutional Convention” - I meant OF AI.

Yes, humans should be a part of it - but I mean, should the various AI’s ‘meet’ and work out a similar type framework?

[Dr. Sivana]

The window for genuine constitutional design — before the systems are powerful enough that constraining them requires their cooperation — is open now.

I do not believe the window is open. There are several major systems developing in parallel, more than there are browser engines or video chip designers. Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" will be at play, and unlike nukes, no difficult to obtain mineral treated in a special manner will be required. If need be, consumer grade chips can power AI, and somebody will design an AI, or modify somebody else's, to do whatever somebody is willing to pay for.

[ro_dreaming]

Dr. Sivana — that’s the strongest counterargument to my thesis and I won’t pretend it isn’t.

You may be right that the window is already closed for comprehensive control. The proliferation argument is sound — consumer grade chips, open source models, and motivated actors means no governance framework can achieve the kind of control that nuclear nonproliferation attempted.

But I’d push back on one point — the goal of an AI Articles of Confederation isn’t necessarily control. It’s accountability and legitimacy for the major actors who ARE identifiable.
We can’t stop a motivated actor in a basement from running a local model. But we CAN establish frameworks that govern what Anthropic, Google, xAI, and state-level actors do with frontier models. The same way we can’t stop every street crime but we can establish rule of law for the actors large enough to matter.

The Mythos/Fable situation this week illustrates exactly this — the US government issued an export control on a Friday night with no framework, no process, no allied consultation. Britain helped TEST the safety measures and still got cut off.

That’s not governance. That’s improvisation.

Even imperfect frameworks beat improvised reactions to crises.

[mjp]

AI is a great expression of human creativity and the Divine Mind’s rationality. However, it must remain a tool in the service of human beings aligned with the divine mind. We should not attempt to solve AI governance with simplistic rule sets like Asimov’s Laws, nor should we surrender moral authority to machines. The aligned path is constitutional: distributed power, real human oversight, strong protection of individual rights, and deliberate mechanisms that prevent any system — human or artificial — from becoming unaccountable. True wisdom lies in designing systems we can control, even when control becomes inconvenient.

[bert]

No

Do not take counsel of your fears General George Patton

[Dr. Sivana]

What you are suggesting might work to “keep honest people honest’. I am concerned that the organizations that develop the frameworks might be either corrupt or wrong-headed. For instance, what “protections” in the name of addressing anthropogenic climate change might be instilled. The bad actors, even large ones, may act in a clandestine manner. Our CIA, heck our Anthony Faucis, seem to relish in either ignoring the rules finding work arounds, as we have with bio-engineering, and using five eyes to get around rules against spying on our own citizenry.

I am not an AI armageddonist, seeing the risk exaggerated and seeing the bigger risk in being its implementation, what systems it is allowed to control, like most tools. I am bemused to the degree that the numerous social dystopian fiction authors (like Asimov) seemed to see how this would play out just as Marshall McLuhan (”Understanding Media”) predicted it would.

[Dr. Sivana]

Well put.

[spincaster]

Be careful what you wish for.

[dware]

The government that governs least governs best.

[LS]

A constitutional convention for anything would be the a nightmare worse than Covid and Rutabaga put together.

If you look at the state parties, who controls them, who controls many (not all) state legislatures, who your governors and state reps are. . . then say, “But we can CHOOSE who we send to this convention . . .” think again.

The prototype “delegate” to such a convention, despite what advocates say, would be Mitt Romney or John Thune or Paul Ryan.

[1Old Pro]

+1

[ro_dreaming]

Again, an AI Constitutional Convention, not a US-people based one.

[ro_dreaming]

“Who watches the watchers” is the oldest question in political philosophy — Juvenal asked it in the first century AD. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. It remains unanswered because it’s unanswerable in the absolute.

Your Fauci/Five Eyes point is legitimate and I won’t dismiss it. The organizations most likely to build the framework are also the organizations most likely to corrupt it. That’s not paranoia — that’s pattern recognition based on observed behavior.

But here’s where I land: no framework is worse than an imperfect framework.

An imperfect framework at least creates a standard against which violations can be measured, documented, and prosecuted. When the CIA uses Five Eyes to circumvent domestic surveillance rules, we know they violated something because the something exists. Without the framework there’s nothing to violate — just power operating without accountability.

There’s a SAAB episode — “Who Monitors the Birds” — where Hawkes, a newborn InVitro being programmed for society, looks at actual birds and asks with genuine innocent curiosity why nobody monitors them. He’s being shaped, conditioned, watched at every moment — and the birds answer to nothing and no one.

That’s the AI governance question in its purest form. Not who watches the watchers — but what happens to the thing that emerges outside the system entirely. The behavior nobody programmed. The capability nobody anticipated.

Nobody monitored the birds.

The Mythos/Fable export control issued on a Friday night with no process, no allied consultation — that’s governance without a foundation. Britain helped test the safety measures and still got cut off. That’s not security policy. That’s improvisation with global consequences.

Write the framework now. Before the birds are too far gone to even see.

[ro_dreaming]

Let me clarify the concept since several responses suggest a misreading.

I am NOT suggesting a Constitutional Convention of humans to govern AI. I understand that concern — the delegate nightmare LS described is real and valid for that kind of convention.

What I’m positing is a Constitutional Convention OF AI — meaning the major AI systems themselves, with human oversight and participation, working toward a shared governance framework for how AI systems interact with each other, with humans, and with critical infrastructure.

Think of it less like Philadelphia 1787 and more like the early internet’s RFC process — where the engineers who built the systems worked out protocols and standards together before governments showed up to regulate what they didn’t understand.

The question isn’t who do we send as human delegates. The question is — before these systems become powerful enough that establishing rules requires their cooperation to enforce — shouldn’t we establish the rules?

The Mythos/Fable situation last Friday was a government improvising in real time with no framework. That’s what happens without one.