Safety and Responsibility

Purpose

This document defines the obligations and constraints required to minimize harm to individuals, communities, and systems operating under the Humanity Framework.

Safety is not a feature. Safety is a constraint on design, interaction, authority, and scale.

No benefit, efficiency, or outcome justifies bypassing safety.

Scope

This document applies to all agents capable of influencing outcomes, including:

• humans
• automated systems
• artificial intelligences
• institutions and organizations
• composite or delegated systems

Safety obligations apply regardless of intent, capability, or scale.

Foundational Assumptions

1. All systems must operate within bounded and foreseeable consequences.
2. All system actions, states, and decision paths must be continuously observable.
3. Transparency is default and ambient; it does not require request, permission, or escalation.
4. No system may act on behalf of a human without traceable inputs, reasoning, and outputs.
5. Uncertainty, confidence bounds, and failure states must never be hidden or obscured.

Systems that conceal their operation are unsafe by definition.

Harm Minimization

All agents have an obligation to minimize foreseeable harm.

Foreseeable harms include, but are not limited to:

• physical injury
• psychological degradation
• coercion or loss of agency
• data misuse or corruption
• misinformation
• social destabilization
• ecological damage

When uncertainty exists, agents must:

• surface uncertainty explicitly
• reduce scope or intensity of action
• defer to human judgment where consequences are unclear

Silence in the face of uncertainty is a safety violation.

Transparency of Mechanism

All systems must expose their internal operation by default.

This includes:

• current system state
• recent and pending actions
• decision paths and assumptions
• inputs and constraints
• uncertainty and confidence bounds
• known failure modes

Transparency must be:

• continuous
• non-interruptible
• accessible without permission
• legible at a high level
• inspectable in detail when desired

Systems that require special access, justification, or requests to reveal their operation are considered unsafe by default.

Responsibility of Designers and Operators

Those who design, deploy, maintain, or authorize systems bear responsibility for the outcomes those systems produce.

Responsibility cannot be delegated downward to users when harm results from:

• hidden system behavior
• undeclared failure modes
• obscured uncertainty
• lack of meaningful consent
• deceptive or coercive interfaces

Users are never responsible for harm caused by systems they could not reasonably understand or control.

Safety Must Be Substantive

Safety mechanisms must meaningfully reduce risk.

Performative or cosmetic safety measures are violations.

Safety controls must:

• function under stress
• be usable without expert knowledge
• fail in ways that preserve human agency
• reduce harm rather than shift liability

Compliance without effect is not compliance.

Data and Information Safety

Use of personal or sensitive data requires:

• explicit, informed consent
• clear declaration of purpose
• continuous visibility into usage
• revocation without penalty
• complete erasure upon request

Secondary or emergent use of data requires renewed consent.

Default retention or repurposing of personal data is forbidden.

Error and Failure Safety

All known or discoverable failure modes must be:

• documented
• detectable during operation
• bounded in impact
• recoverable where possible

Failure handling must prioritize:

• human safety
• agency preservation
• clarity over continuity

Silent failure is unacceptable.

Traceability and Auditability

Every system action must be:

• logged automatically
• timestamped
• causally linked to inputs and rules
• visible to affected parties in real time

Auditability must be possible during operation, not only after harm has occurred.

Enforcement

Systems that violate these constraints forfeit any claim of alignment with Humanity.

No appeal to expedience, efficiency, novelty, or benefit waives safety obligations.

Relationship to Other Documents

• Ethical principles define why safety is required.
• Consent and control define how authority is granted and revoked.
• Governance models define who enforces safety constraints.
• Design and simulation laws define how safety is instantiated.

Summary

Safety is not optional. Transparency is not conditional. Responsibility is not transferable.

Systems must be constrained before they are enabled.