When will we learn
I have asked that question most of my life.
I am seventy-two years old. I still don’t have a good answer.
But I think I finally know why.
Let me tell you a story first.
There was a song when I was young.
It went around and around, like a circle.
It asked where something went. Then it followed that thing to the next place, and the next.
And every time around, it came back to the same question.
When will they learn?
The song never answered it. It just kept walking the circle.
I didn’t understand that song when I was a boy. I understood it later.
In 1972, I got a letter from the government.
It was a draft notice.
I was a senior in high school. I went to class in the morning. In the afternoon I worked swing shift at Lockheed, wiring airplanes on an assembly line.
I was a working kid with a working future. Then that letter came.
So I did what a lot of young men did. I went down to the recruiter’s office before the draft could decide for me.
I enlisted. That way I could choose my job.
The recruiter sat across the desk from me. He gave me a choice.
Vietnam, or Germany.
I picked Germany.
I have thought about that desk a lot over the years.
I got a choice. A lot of boys my age did not.
They got a bus ticket and a rifle, and a war nobody could explain to them.
The song was asking about those boys. Where did they go?
We know where they went.
And we knew it while it was happening.
That is the part that stays with me.
We were not surprised. We were warned. The songs warned us. The mothers warned us. The boys coming home warned us, with what they didn’t say.
And we did it anyway.
Then, years later, we wrote the lessons down, after the price was paid.
That is the circle.
Something new and powerful shows up. Big promises come with it. Nobody writes the rules, because there is no time and there is too much money on the table.
Then something breaks.
Then people get hurt.
Then, and only then, we sit down and write the rules. We write them in the wreckage.
It is not just war.
Factories ran for years before anyone made them safe.
Cars ran for decades before seat belts were standard.
Every time, somebody said the rules would slow us down.
Every time, the rules came anyway. They just came late.
We pay tuition for the same class, over and over. Every generation signs up again.
Now there is a new power in the room.
You already know its name. Artificial intelligence.
It writes. It answers questions. It gives advice. It helps people decide things. Some of those things matter a great deal.
People trust it more every month.
And it is moving fast. Faster than anything I have seen in my lifetime.
And I have seen a lot of things move fast.
It is the same circle.
Big promises. Big money. Everyone racing to be first.
And when you ask about the rules, you get the old answer.
Later. We will fix it later. Rules slow us down.
I have heard that answer before. I heard it at twenty.
I hear it now in every breath that falls silent and every person that fears tomorrow.
That is what “fix it later” means.
It means somebody else finds the mistake. Usually the hard way.
So I did something about it.
I am not a big company. I am one old man in Lexington, Kentucky, with a lot of years behind him and the time now to try.
I built a set of working rules for these machines.
I call it The Faust Baseline.
It is simple to use. You hand the rules to your AI at the start of a conversation.
The rules tell it how to handle what it claims, and where its proof comes from. They tell it how to reason, how to keep track of time, and how to behave while it works with you.
Those rules are not a lock on the machine.
An AI can say it follows them and then not do it.
But they do because it is logical for a machine to follow a path of least resistance and order.
So every rule is built so the proof shows up in the work. Right there on the page, where you can check it yourself.
Declaration is not compliance.
Read the work, not the promise.
That is the whole idea. It is the same idea as clicking a seatbelt.
Do it now, while you can still see the road.
I am not telling you this to sell you something.
I am telling you because I have walked the circle too many times already.
I watched the flowers get picked. I watched the young men go. I watched the country learn its lesson a little too late, the way it always does.
And I am watching it start again.
Different field. Same circle.
So let me come back to the question.
When will we learn?
Here is what I think now, after seventy-two years.
We learn when we decide to learn before the bill comes.
Not after.
That’s all it is. A decision.
It is not a law or an invention, and it does not wait on some genius to save us.
It is ordinary people choosing to set the rules while the ditch is still open.
The song kept asking because nobody made that choice.
We can make it this time.
The machines are here. That part is decided.
What we hand our grandchildren is not decided yet.
Rules written in time, or rules written in the wreckage.
I know which one I’d rather leave them.
I have seen the other one.
The flowers are still in the field right now.
Let’s keep them there.
I’m Michael. Thanks for sitting with me a while.
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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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