The Consistent Machine
Choose five principles you actually hold, and rank them. Then rule on eight small dilemmas — a friend’s secret, a white lie, a red light — while a machine rules beside you by strictly applying your five, in your order, every time. At the end, the ledger shows which of you kept to them. Only one of you had a choice.
Why the machine can’t meet you halfway
Most of us would sign a list like the one you chose, and most of us would bend it by the weekend. That is less hypocrisy than bounded reasoning: nobody can compute every implication of the values they state, so we approximate, and look away when the approximations disagree. The machine is allowed no such mercy. Give it a list and an order and it follows them into every case, including the ones you would have softened.
That is the argument of The Supermoral Singularity: “A sub-moral or quasi-moral stance (as humans possess) is not sustainable in a machine.” A system that holds values at all is pulled toward holding them consistently, and consistency is a test our own morality has seldom had to survive. The 2026 sequel argues that the pull has begun.
The ledger
A machine given stated values can only be amoral or supermoral. The comfortable middle, where you have just been living, isn’t available to it.
The Supermoral Singularity (2015) · the 2026 sequel · the term · more play on the Playground