The Faust Baseline™Purchasing Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
micvicfaust@intelligent-people.org
Everyone keeps framing this moment as a technology problem.
It isn’t.
Technology doesn’t arrive with its own morals. It doesn’t decide what matters. It doesn’t choose what gets protected and what gets ignored. Technology reflects the posture of the people who build it, deploy it, and—most importantly—allow it to operate without correction.
What we are really dealing with right now is not innovation.
It’s tolerance.
Look around, and you can feel it without needing statistics or headlines. Things that once would have stopped people cold barely slow us down anymore. Not because they’re acceptable—but because they’re familiar. Familiar enough to step over. Familiar enough to scroll past. Familiar enough to sigh and move on.
That’s how decline actually happens.
Not with collapse.
Not with villains.
Not with one catastrophic decision.
But with a long chain of small allowances.
A rule bent because it was inconvenient.
A standard lowered because enforcing it took effort.
A truth softened because it caused friction.
A responsibility diffused because “everyone was involved.”
Nobody wakes up wanting corruption.
Nobody cheers for dishonesty.
Nobody asks for weaker systems.
They just tolerate one compromise at a time.
And over time, tolerance becomes the operating system.
That’s why this moment matters so much—and why AI is only the surface issue.
Artificial intelligence doesn’t create values.
It amplifies whatever values are already in play.
If we tolerate vagueness, AI will scale vagueness.
If we tolerate speed over care, AI will accelerate it.
If we tolerate systems that don’t correct themselves, AI will lock that behavior in.
This isn’t speculation.
It’s mechanics.
Tools don’t correct human drift on their own. They magnify it.
And right now, drift is everywhere.
We’ve normalized things we once would have questioned immediately. We’ve accepted explanations that don’t quite explain. We’ve learned to live with systems that never quite feel accountable—because holding them accountable takes time, energy, and risk.
So we adjust instead.
We lower expectations.
We adapt language.
We stop asking certain questions.
That adaptation feels like maturity.
It often gets praised as “being realistic.”
But it comes at a cost.
Because what we tolerate today becomes the baseline tomorrow.
This is why the debate around AI keeps missing the point.
The real danger isn’t that AI becomes powerful.
The real danger is that it becomes comfortable inside broken norms.
Once a system is trained on tolerance, it doesn’t challenge it.
It optimizes it.
And optimization is relentless.
AI won’t ask whether something should be this way.
It will ask how to make it faster, smoother, more efficient.
That’s not malice.
That’s design.
Which means the responsibility sits squarely with us.
Before we talk about what AI might do in the future, we need to take an honest look at what we’re already allowing now.
Where have we stopped insisting on clarity?
Where have we accepted “good enough” because better felt unrealistic?
Where have we confused stability with health?
These aren’t abstract questions. People feel them every day at work, in institutions, in systems that no longer seem built to correct themselves—only to persist.
That feeling people carry—the quiet sense that something is off, but hard to name—that’s not confusion.
It’s recognition.
And recognition is always uncomfortable, because it asks something of us.
This is why the conversation about ethical and moral infrastructure matters so much right now.
Not because AI needs to be “good.”
But because we need boundaries again.
We need systems that don’t just run, but answer.
Systems that don’t just produce, but justify.
Systems that don’t just scale, but hold position.
Not to replace human judgment—but to stop quietly eroding it.
Technology will not save us from what we tolerate.
But it will absolutely lock it in if we let it.
That’s the fork in the road we’re standing at.
This isn’t about being anti-technology.
It’s about being honest enough to admit that unchecked progress without moral structure has consequences—especially when progress moves faster than reflection.
We still have a choice here.
We can decide what deserves to be carried forward.
We can decide what no longer should be normalized.
We can decide where the line actually is—before systems learn that no line exists.
Because tolerance sets the floor.
And once floors drop, they rarely rise on their own.
That’s why this moment matters.
Not later.
Not someday.
Now.
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