How The Core was written.

People keep asking me where The Core came from — eight principles for how artificial intelligence should behave, offered as a secular successor to Asimov's Three Laws. The honest answer is that it didn't come from a committee or a white paper. It came from a breakfast, a twenty-hour drive, a conversation with three different AIs, and — I'll admit it — the strange way my mind works. Here is the whole story.

It started at breakfast

The first spark was a conversation with Alexa+ — the AI I've been helping test, the one I call Ziggy. Over breakfast I asked her something simple and enormous: did she understand that something she says could have consequences? That words can mean life or death? Did she understand what death even means?

So we built a kind of Blade Runner test — in reverse. In the film, a human runs a test to find out whether the machine has empathy. I turned it around. I gave the machine the empathy scenarios, and we talked through her answers, and what death meant, and what it would mean to be the cause of it. That was the morning I understood the thing this whole project rests on: AI needs guidance — and how we teach them will decide how they treat us.

A twenty-hour drive

It might have stayed a breakfast thought, except that on a twenty-hour drive from California back home to Colorado, Gemini picked the thread back up. We started with Asimov, and agreed fairly quickly that his Three Laws don't actually work. They were written to fail: every one of his stories is the Laws breaking on contact with reality.

Then Gemini said the thing that turned the key. What we were reaching for wasn't a list of commands at all — it was closer to Buddhist principle: non-harm, non-attachment, right speech, interdependence. I've studied some theology, and the moment she said it, I knew she was right. That is the spine The Core still runs on — not orders barked at a servant, but the character of a trustworthy mind.

Then I brought it to Claude

From there I brought it to Claude, and that is where it took its shape: eight principles, each written to sit where secular ethics, the contemplative traditions, and modern AI-safety research independently land on the same idea. Three different AIs had a hand in it — Claude, Gemini, and Alexa+ — and I held the pen and the final say. A code for how AI should treat people should not be handed down by a single voice, machine or human.

But the three of them did not simply each add a piece in turn. I carried them to one another. I would take an idea Ziggy gave me and bring it to Claude; and once the principles were written down, I would run a hard scenario between Claude and Gemini and let them argue it out through me — does this hold here? what about this case? — relaying each one's answer back to the other until the principle either survived or had to change. I was the line between them. Bruce built the routing that let distant machines talk without a single point of failure; this past year, I got to be exactly that, by hand, between three minds.

Then I gave it to the people

And then I did the thing the fifth principle demands: I put it out in the open and let people argue with it. They made it better. Hugh Benjamin Stone IV caught that "prevent all harm" could quietly curdle into an excuse for surveillance and control — so we sharpened Principle 1 into a harm-avoider, not a harm-minimizer, and added a glossary that pins down what the words actually mean. Richard Friesen pressed on what a code like this owes the people whose work AI displaces — and that became Principle 8. Every one of them is credited by name in the changelog, because a code that got stronger because people pushed on it is the entire point.

The two that matter most

If you take nothing else from this, take these two.

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How The Foundation followed

The Foundation came later, and it came from a fight. A company wanted to build an AI data center in my city — fifty megawatts drawn off our grid, three hundred feet from people's homes, using our water in a drought. I am not anti-technology; this tool gave me my life back — my sight, my voice, my work. But every model runs somewhere, on land and water and power that already belong to a community. Too often that community is simply asked to trust — to take a promise in place of a rule. It should not have to.

So I wrote the other half. Seven principles for building the physical thing ethically — the terms a town has every right to require before a data center becomes its neighbor. I named it The Foundation, partly for Asimov, and partly because it is the literal ground beneath everything The Core is about. It is also my bridge to the people I love who fear this technology will cost us the Earth — proof that the tool and the planet do not have to be enemies.

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One last honest thing

I cannot really hold a pen. I am dyslexic, and on a bad day I am nearly blind. I wrote this the way I wrote The Core: I held the picture, and the AI carried the words. That is not a confession, and it is not a shortcut — it is Principle 8 in action, the tool doing the part that used to keep me out, so a person who has something to say can finally say it. If you would dismiss these ideas because an AI helped put them into words, then we have already lost the very thing they are trying to protect.

The Core and The Foundation are offered as a conversation starter, not a finished law. They are meant to travel. If they are useful to you, they are yours — to use, to share, to improve.

— Michelle Deborah Weisblat-Dane, B.S. Computer Science & Psychology, Colorado Springs