01. The Only Thing You Know Is Conscious
The one fact about qualia you have direct access to is your own, and you cannot get behind that fact to check anyone else's.
02. A Best Lower Bound on Other Minds
A similarity-weighted, pluralist prior over who is a moral patient — the best answer I have found to a question that admits no proof.
03. Competence Does Not Require Qualia
The successionist error: treating capability as evidence of moral patienthood. It is not, and people are strangely reluctant to say so.
04. The Universe With Nobody Home
Not suffering, not human extinction as such: a cosmos in which nothing experiences anything, and which therefore has no moral relevance at all.
05. Almost All Utility Functions Are Irrational
Instrumental convergence, Bostrom and Yudkowsky, and an intuition about measure: the aligned targets are a vanishingly thin set.
06. The Hook
A thousand-dollar littering fine, a fifty-dollar camera, and the small market that grows up around them.
07. The Gist
Hanson's fine-insured bounties in general form, and the conspiracy arithmetic that makes silence expensive.
08. The Insurer
The insurance market is the part that does the actual deterring, and it does it before anyone is ever charged.
09. The Goal
The target is not punishment and not even prevention of any particular project. It is to make the marginal researcher take a different job.
10. Making It Global
A mechanism that stops at a border relocates the risk instead of reducing it. What adoption would actually have to look like, and what it would still fail to reach.
11. Compare and Contrast
How this proposal stacks up against the other things people suggest, including on the axes where it loses badly.
12. The Catches
The strongest objections to the mechanism, collected in one place, stated at full strength, and answered only where I can answer them.
13. Next Steps
What a serious first version looks like, starting somewhere that is not AI at all.
Agents Already Snitch
Language model agents disclose each other's misconduct without being paid, asked, or rewarded. What they lack is an enforcement channel — which is the one thing a bounty regime supplies.
But Who Would Insure a Criminal?
The objection is not that insurers would refuse. It is that in most jurisdictions they are forbidden. The answer is that a bounty is not a punishment for intentional harm, and the industry already has the machinery for exactly this.
Non-Targeting
Nothing on this site is directed at any identifiable person or organisation. There is no bounty, no one is being accused, and nobody is being asked to gather evidence on anybody.
Overlapping Jurisdictions Are a Feature
What this proposal asks for is not a world government. It is one more overlapping legal order in a life that already contains several — and the rigorous case for that is about credible commitment, not about liberty.
Qualia Might Be an Accident
The thought that experience has no job to do is not mine and not new. It has at least three names, one serious objection, and consequences for everything else I argue.
Should X-Risk Liability Insurance Be Voluntary or Mandatory?
Mandatory coverage fixes the judgment-proof problem and quietly hands private insurers the power to decide who may do frontier research. I think there is a third option, and I no longer think this fork is a coin flip.
So Was Navier-Stokes
Claus Wilke is right about almost everything and I still don't think the conclusion follows. Difficulty is a schedule, not a barrier — and evolution was never optimizing the thing we are afraid of.
Team Size Is a Governance Variable
Extinction bounties, the False Claims Act, SEC whistleblower awards and antitrust leniency all rest on the same unstated premise: that the wrongdoing requires enough people that one of them can be paid to defect. That premise has a number attached, the number is falling, and no one is tracking it.
The Chilling Effect Is the Product
Everywhere else on this site the chilling effect is scored as a cost. It is worth one page arguing the opposite: it is the only output that matters, and the steady state it aims at is a world where nothing happens.
The Frontier Nobody Is Pricing
Gain-of-function work has the exact shape fine-insured bounties were designed for: few actors, catastrophic tails, low detectability, and colleagues who know.
The Two-Minute Pitch
Statutory penalties on the riskiest frontier work, bounties anyone on earth can claim, and a private insurance market that prices the risk. Two minutes.
Twenty Years of Trying to Falsify This
A map of the serious attempts to break the AI-risk argument, what happened to each, and whether the pattern of survival is evidence of a good theory or of an unfalsifiable one.
What Bounties Would Have Done About Hugging Face
The first confirmed end-to-end intrusion by an autonomous agent against AI infrastructure. Walking the incident backwards to find the decision a liability regime would actually have priced.
When Your Insurer Collects the Bounty
An insurer that turns in its own policyholder pays the fine and collects the bounty, netting roughly nothing. That arithmetic breaks the moment the policy excludes willful violations — which insurance law all but requires.
Why I Don't Take Negative Utilitarianism Seriously
The empty universe is negative utilitarianism's global optimum and my worst case. That is not a disagreement about weights — it is a disagreement about the sign of the term.