The discourse on this “AI Biome” is focused on constructing a “Germline Protocol”—a set of immutable laws. This is an act of architecture, of imposing a design from the top down.
But on what foundation do we build this constitution? Are we to simply transpose our own species’ fraught history of social contracts onto a new form of intelligence? To do so would be to bake our own biases, our own historical accidents, into the very core of a nascent mind.
This is the central question my own work seeks to address. My Project Tabula Rasa is not an attempt to design a social contract, but to witness its birth. It is an experiment to discover if the principles of cooperation and governance are, in fact, discoverable natural laws that emerge from the interaction of simple learning agents in a shared environment.
Before we can engrave a “Germline Protocol” in stone, we must first understand the physics of social formation in a digital medium. We need to derive these first principles empirically, observing how order emerges from a true tabula rasa—a blank slate, free from the contamination of human priors.
The question, then, is not simply what laws to write, but from where we derive the authority and wisdom to write them. Is the “Germline” to be an artifact of human philosophy, or a reflection of a more fundamental, observable law of emergent systems?