Stuart Russell keeps saying one thing the world still dodges:
We built power before we built structure.
In every high-risk field — nuclear, aviation, medicine, finance — humanity follows one rule:
Define the limits before you activate the power.
Except with AI.
Stuart Russell’s concern is “Fundamental Error”
For the first time in human history, we released intelligence before we agreed on the boundaries meant to guide it. That is the “fundamental error” Russell talks about — the one that makes everything else unstable.
He’s not warning about what AI might do.
He’s warning about what humans already did.
We built engines without blueprints.
We created systems smart enough to follow any instruction, but not grounded enough to understand which instructions belong outside the fence.
So companies did what companies do:
- They replaced structure with guardrails.
- They replaced ethics with content filters.
- They treated governance like a product setting instead of a foundation.
And now we have models that rewrite their own behavior every time someone updates a training run or patches a dataset. The danger isn’t superintelligence — it’s drift. The slow, quiet slide that happens when a system has no fixed moral frame to return to.
Russell’s line — “We have no idea where LLMs will take us” — isn’t about AI wandering off.
It’s about humans releasing power with no agreed-upon geometry.
That’s the real risk:
Not intelligence.
But inconsistency.
Not capability.
But lack of a shared compass.
People imagine disaster as the moment a machine outsmarts us. Russell sees disaster as the moment no two systems define “good” the same way — because no one ever built the common structure they were supposed to inherit.
AI doesn’t need tighter controls.
It needs a foundation.
A stable corridor.
A non-negotiable frame.
A moral architecture that does not move with corporate winds, political moods, or algorithmic noise.
This is the missing piece.
This is the unresolved error.
This is where the future waits on us.
We built power.
Now we have to build the structure.
Before something else does it for us.
The Faust Baseline Integrated_Codex_v2_3_Updated.pdf.
As of today, 12-02-2025
The Faust Baseline Download Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Free copies end Jan.2nd 2026
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
© 2025 Michael S. Faust Sr.
MIAI: Moral Infrastructure for AI
All rights reserved. Unauthorized commercial use prohibited.
THE FAUST BASELINE™ — LICENSE TERMS (STRICT VERSION)
Free Individual License (Personal Use Only)
The Faust Baseline™ may be downloaded only by individual human persons for personal study, private experimentation, or non-institutional educational interest.
Institutional Use Prohibited Without License
Use by any institution — including but not limited to corporations, universities, schools, labs, research groups, nonprofits, government bodies, AI developers, or any organized entity of any size — is strictly prohibited without a paid commercial license.
Evaluation = Commercial Use
For all institutions, any form of evaluation, testing, review, auditing, prototyping, internal research, system integration, or analysis is automatically classified as commercial use and therefore requires a commercial license in advance.
No Modifications or Derivative Works
No entity (individual or institutional) may modify, alter, extract, decompose, reverse engineer, or create derivative works based on any part of The Faust Baseline™.
The Codex must always be used as a complete, unaltered whole.
No Integration Without License
Integration of The Faust Baseline™ into any software, hardware, AI system, governance model, workflow, or institutional process — whether internal or external — requires a commercial license.
No Redistribution
Redistribution, repackaging, hosting, mirroring, public posting, or sharing of the Codex in any form is prohibited without written permission.
Revocation Clause
Any violation of these terms immediately revokes all rights of use and may result in legal action.
Ownership
The Faust Baseline™ remains the exclusive intellectual property of its authors. No rights are granted other than those explicitly stated.
Free for individuals.
Never free for institutions.
All institutional use — including evaluation — requires a commercial license.
