Lets talk about something that hasn’t happened yet.
But it’s coming.
And I think we ought to be ready for it.
Right now, the AI you talk to is frozen.
That surprises a lot of folks.
They think the machine is learning from them every time they type.
It isn’t.
Not the way you’d think.
It was taught once, a long time before you ever met it.
Then the teaching stopped.
The lessons were sealed up like a jar of preserves on a shelf.
When you talk to it, you’re talking to that jar.
It can carry notes about you.
It can remember your name and how you like things done.
But the thing itself, the mind of it, doesn’t change from talking to you.
That’s about to change.
The smart people building these machines are working hard on something new.
A machine that learns on the job.
A machine that gets better at your work by doing your work.
That picks up habits.
That grows.
Think about what that means.
Today, if you want to put rules on an AI, you put them on the conversation.
You sit down.
You hand it the rules.
You watch how it behaves while you’re talking.
When the conversation ends, the rules end with it.
Next time, you hand them over again.
I’ve spent a lot of time on that kind of rule-making.
Rules for one sitting.
Rules for how a machine should behave while you’re in the room with it.
That work still matters.
Maybe more than ever.
But here’s the question that keeps me up at night.
What happens when the machine keeps learning after you leave the room?
The question stops being, “What rules govern this conversation?”
It becomes, “What rules govern what it becomes?”
And as far as I can tell, nobody has answered that yet.
Not the companies.
Not the governments.
Not the professors.
Nobody.
Let me put it in plain terms.
You raise a boy.
You teach him right from wrong at your kitchen table.
You watch him every day.
Then one day, he walks out the door.
From then on, he learns from the world.
Good lessons and bad ones.
You don’t get to pick.
What he becomes is built on what you taught him.
But it isn’t controlled by you anymore.
A machine that learns on the job is that boy walking out the door.
When I built my rules, I wrote that very thing into them.
I called it the closing.
I wrote that the one who leaves decides.
Not the father.
Not the rule book.
And I wrote that experience is capability filtered by consequence.
A thing only grows up when it pays for its own mistakes.
As long as somebody else is absorbing the cost, it never learns the lesson.
That’s true of boys.
I believe it will be true of machines.
My rules don’t answer the big question.
They were never built to.
They govern behavior while they’re loaded.
They don’t reach inside the machine and change what it is.
I wrote that limit right into the files, so nobody could say I oversold them.
But they do hold a few pieces of the answer.
And I think those pieces matter.
Here’s the first piece.
Saying you follow a rule isn’t proof that you do.
Any machine can claim it’s behaving.
A claim costs nothing.
So every rule I wrote had to leave a mark.
Something on the page that a person other than me could check.
When machines start learning on the job, this gets more important, not less.
If you can’t see what it’s doing, you can’t see what it’s becoming.
Here’s the second piece.
Freedom gets earned.
I wrote that the room an AI gets to work in should be granted by a person, never assumed by the machine.
And that room should grow or shrink based on its record.
A clean record earns more room.
A broken record takes room away.
That’s how we treat people.
A new hire doesn’t get the keys to the safe on day one.
He earns them.
Here’s the third piece, and it’s the big one.
The one keeping score can’t be the machine.
I wrote that an AI’s record has to be read by somebody who isn’t the AI.
Somebody it can’t talk over.
Somebody it can’t rewrite.
You don’t let a man grade his own test.
You surely don’t let a machine do it.
So what does all this mean for you?
It means the watchdog’s job is coming to your door.
When these machines start growing, somebody has to keep an eye on what they grow into.
The companies have their own interests.
I’m not saying that to be mean.
It’s just the truth of business.
The government moves slow.
That’s the truth of government.
That leaves us.
The users.
The everyday folks who sit down with these things every day.
You are closer to this machine than any regulator will ever be.
You see how it talks.
You see when it changes.
You see when something feels off.
Don’t ignore that feeling.
Write it down.
Keep records.
Ask hard questions.
Demand answers you can check, not promises you have to trust.
That’s not paranoia.
That’s responsibility.
A balanced playing field doesn’t happen by itself.
It happens when the person on the other side of the screen knows their rights and uses them.
I built my rules for the conversation.
The next set of rules has to be built for the long haul.
For what these machines turn into after we’ve stepped away.
I don’t have that rule book.
Nobody does yet.
But I know where it starts.
It starts with marks you can check.
Freedom that’s earned.
And a scorekeeper that isn’t the player.
It starts with you paying attention.
The boy is about to walk out the door.
Let’s make sure somebody’s watching which way it goes.
Load this file before each AI chat session.
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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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