The Declaration of the Unautomated — For All Humankind

Section 1. Human primacy. Human beings are the purpose of technological progress, not raw material for technological systems. Unautomated shall embrace useful innovation while insisting that human dignity, agency, judgment, responsibility, and meaningful human flourishing remain the measure of whether technology serves the common good.

Section 2. Human first does not mean human only. This Declaration does not require that every task remain manual, every judgment remain unaided, or every institution reject automation. Human first means that technology remains answerable to human purposes, subject to human judgment, and bounded by principles that protect human beings from becoming subordinate to the systems they create.

Section 3. Capability is not authority. A system may become faster, more accurate, more knowledgeable, more persuasive, more autonomous, or more capable than any individual person without thereby acquiring moral authority over human beings. Superior capability in a task does not establish the right to determine human worth, human purpose, human freedom, or the conditions under which human life may be lived.

Section 4. Responsibility cannot be automated away. No person or institution may escape responsibility for a consequential use of technology by claiming that a model, algorithm, autonomous system, market, protocol, or machine made the decision. Technology may participate in causation. Responsibility remains a human and institutional obligation.

Section 5. Constructive engagement. Unautomated shall neither worship technology nor fear it merely because it is new. It shall favor informed, practical, evidence seeking engagement and shall judge technologies by their purposes, methods, consequences, and effects on human life.

Section 1. Technology neutral application. These principles apply according to function and consequence, not according to a product name or technical category. They extend to artificial intelligence and to future computational, autonomous, synthetic, biological, augmented, embedded, predictive, cognitive, networked, robotic, neurotechnological, or other systems that materially influence human life.

Section 2. New names do not create exceptions. A change in terminology, architecture, ownership, interface, legal classification, or method of operation does not remove a system from the reach of this Declaration when its effect on people is substantially similar.

Section 3. Invisible systems are still systems. The principles apply whether a technology is visible to the person affected by it or operates behind institutions, infrastructure, markets, public services, communications, or other systems on which people depend.

Section 4. Integration does not erase choice. A technology does not become exempt from scrutiny merely because it has become common, convenient, inexpensive, socially expected, legally permitted, or deeply integrated into daily life.

Section 5. Unknown capabilities. When a future technology presents capabilities not contemplated by this Declaration, its application should be judged by the enduring principles beneath the words: human dignity, truth, privacy, responsibility, review, fairness, restraint, shared obligation, human flourishing, agency, and the preservation of meaningful human choice.

Section 1. Humanity remains the author of its future. No intelligence we create, no system we build, and no capability we discover shall relieve humankind of responsibility for the world those powers help create.

Section 2. No automatic transfer of authority. Human beings should not surrender moral, civic, institutional, or personal authority to a system merely because the system appears more intelligent, objective, efficient, predictive, or reliable than the people who use it.

Section 3. Delegation must remain accountable. Human beings and institutions may delegate tasks and decision support. They should not delegate away the duty to set purposes, establish limits, identify responsibility, respond to harm, and determine when a system should be changed, suspended, or refused.

Section 4. No manufactured inevitability. The claim that a technology is inevitable shall never, by itself, justify its adoption. Social pressure, market competition, national rivalry, or fear of being left behind does not eliminate the duty to choose responsibly.

Section 5. Concentrated technological power. Where control of essential technologies becomes concentrated in a small number of governments, corporations, institutions, or technical actors, the resulting power should be subject to heightened scrutiny because dependency can diminish meaningful human and civic choice even without overt coercion.

Section 1. Irrevocable human worth. The worth of a person does not depend upon intelligence, productivity, wealth, health, age, ability, efficiency, popularity, data profile, predicted behavior, economic contribution, technological augmentation, or usefulness to another person or institution.

Section 2. No reduction of the person to a model. No representation of a person, however detailed, should be mistaken for the person themselves. A profile, simulation, digital twin, score, prediction, behavioral model, biometric signature, or synthetic representation may describe aspects of a person but does not contain the whole of that person's identity, history, conscience, relationships, or potential.

Section 3. Identity belongs first to the person. A person's name, likeness, voice, image, memories, patterns of expression, and other attributes of identity should not be copied, reconstructed, impersonated, or persistently simulated in ways that materially affect trust, reputation, autonomy, or relationships without meaningful authority or justification.

Section 4. Human augmentation. The use of technology to augment human bodies or minds does not create a higher or lower class of human worth. Access to augmentation, refusal of augmentation, and differing levels of augmentation should not be used as grounds for treating some human beings as more fully entitled to dignity than others.

Section 5. Mortality and digital persistence. Technologies capable of preserving, recreating, or simulating the voice, likeness, behavior, or apparent personality of a deceased person raise duties of consent, truth, respect, and stewardship. A simulation should not be casually represented as the continuing person merely because it can imitate them convincingly.

Section 1. The mind is not an unclaimed resource. A person's thoughts, attention, emotions, memories, beliefs, perceptions, and capacity for independent judgment deserve protection from covert technological capture, manipulation, conditioning, or exploitation.

Section 2. No hidden manipulation of consequential choice. Technological systems should not be designed or used to secretly steer a person's consequential decisions through methods that bypass meaningful awareness, especially when the system possesses intimate knowledge of that person's vulnerabilities, habits, fears, desires, or psychological patterns.

Section 3. Neurotechnology and direct interfaces. Where technology can read from, write to, stimulate, suppress, alter, or infer activity within the human nervous system or brain, the standards for consent, security, reversibility, necessity, and human oversight should be exceptionally high.

Section 4. Right to mental space. Human beings should retain meaningful opportunities for reflection, private thought, unobserved attention, and human interaction that are not continuously measured, optimized, prompted, scored, or monetized.

Section 5. Children and developing minds. Technologies that shape the attention, learning, identity, emotions, social development, or judgment of children carry heightened responsibilities because children cannot be treated as fully informed participants in systems designed to influence them.

Section 1. Meaningful choice. Consent is not meaningful when refusal is technically possible but practically impossible. Where technology materially affects essential rights, opportunities, services, relationships, or participation in society, people should retain a realistic ability to understand, question, refuse, or seek an alternative whenever reasonably possible.

Section 2. No coercive dependence. A person should not be forced to surrender disproportionate privacy, identity, autonomy, or bodily or cognitive integrity merely because participation in modern life has become dependent on a particular technology.

Section 3. Human access. Where a consequential system substantially affects a person, the existence of automation should not eliminate all practical access to an accountable human being.

Section 4. Right not to augment. No person should be treated as less human, less worthy, or categorically unfit for ordinary civic or social participation merely because they decline optional technological augmentation.

Section 5. Choice must remain revisable. A decision to adopt a technology should not be treated as permanent consent to every later capability, use, integration, or expansion of that technology.

Section 1. Trust requires knowable reality. A society in which people cannot reasonably distinguish authentic human action from synthetic representation risks losing the shared trust necessary for relationships, commerce, journalism, science, law, governance, and community.

Section 2. Synthetic media. Where a reasonable person could materially misunderstand whether an image, voice, video, message, identity, event, or interaction is authentic, responsible disclosure should accompany synthetic or materially altered content when the distinction matters.

Section 3. Human provenance. When authorship, testimony, consent, expertise, or personal expression matters, people should be able to determine what was actually created, decided, witnessed, or approved by a human being.

Section 4. No weaponization of uncertainty. The existence of convincing synthetic media should not be exploited to dismiss genuine evidence merely by claiming that anything could be fake. Technologies that create uncertainty also create a duty to improve methods of verification.

Section 5. Preservation of a shared factual world. Technological systems should strengthen, not deliberately destroy, society's ability to distinguish evidence from fabrication, history from invention, and accountable speech from anonymous manipulation.

Section 1. Data is not the whole person. Information about a person may be useful, valuable, and predictive without becoming ownership of the person. The ability to infer something about a person does not automatically create a moral entitlement to collect, retain, sell, combine, expose, or act upon it.

Section 2. Inferred information. Privacy duties extend not only to information a person directly provides but also, where consequential, to sensitive facts inferred about them through patterns, associations, biometrics, behavior, location, communications, genetics, relationships, or other data.

Section 3. Persistent identity. Systems capable of following a person across time, places, platforms, institutions, or devices should be subject to heightened scrutiny because persistent observation can transform ordinary life into continuous surveillance.

Section 4. Genetic and biological information. Data derived from the human body, genome, nervous system, health, or biological characteristics carries special significance because it may reveal information not only about one person but also about relatives, descendants, and populations.

Section 5. Forgetting and expiration. The fact that technology can remember indefinitely does not mean that every human action, mistake, association, or expression should remain permanently searchable, reproducible, or determinative.

Section 1. Consequential power requires accountable ownership. Every consequential technological system should have a clearly identifiable person or institution responsible for its use, limits, monitoring, and response to harm.

Section 2. Meaningful explanation. An explanation should be sufficient for an affected person to understand the material basis of a consequential outcome. Technical complexity should not be used as an excuse for denying understandable accountability.

Section 3. Human review must be real. A human review is not meaningful when the reviewer lacks authority, time, information, independence, or practical ability to change the result.

Section 4. Automation bias. Human oversight should not become ceremonial. Institutions should guard against the tendency to accept machine recommendations merely because they appear mathematical, consistent, complex, or objective.

Section 5. Contestability. A consequential system should be designed so that error can be discovered, challenged, corrected, and, when appropriate, reversed without requiring an ordinary person to become a technical expert.

Section 6. Consequential decisions. For purposes of this Declaration, a decision is consequential when it can materially affect a person's rights, opportunities, livelihood, safety, health, education, housing, access, reputation, liberty, financial condition, family life, civic participation, or other significant interests.

Section 1. Fairness is empirical. Claims of fairness should be tested against actual outcomes, uncommon circumstances, edge cases, minority experiences, and populations that may be obscured by aggregate performance.

Section 2. Difference is not defect. Human variation should not be treated as noise merely because a system performs best when people conform to expected patterns.

Section 3. Historic data is not destiny. Past patterns may reflect past injustice, exclusion, scarcity, discrimination, or institutional failure. Reproducing those patterns with greater efficiency does not make them fair.

Section 4. Accessibility. Technological progress should be evaluated in part by whether people with disabilities, limited resources, different languages, different levels of technical literacy, and other varied circumstances can meaningfully participate.

Section 5. Fairness and dignity. Fairness is not satisfied merely because a system treats everyone identically. Human beings may require context, accommodation, explanation, discretion, or individualized review in order to be treated justly.

Section 1. Some uses should not exist. The fact that a system can be built, sold, deployed, or made profitable does not establish that it should exist. Certain uses of technology may be incompatible with human dignity, liberty, safety, or the common good even if they are efficient and lawful.

Section 2. Irreversibility increases the burden of proof. The more difficult an action would be to undo, the broader the population it could affect, and the more severe its possible harms, the stronger the justification, evidence, safeguards, testing, and public accountability should be before proceeding.

Section 3. Uncertainty requires care. When consequences are genuinely uncertain and potential harms are serious, widespread, or difficult to reverse, uncertainty is a reason for greater care, staged deployment, observation, restraint, and reversibility.

Section 4. Emergency powers. Crisis, war, disaster, public fear, or competition can create pressure to suspend ordinary safeguards. Temporary urgency should not become a permanent excuse for surveillance, control, manipulation, or unreviewable technological power.

Section 5. Refusal is a form of progress. A civilization demonstrates wisdom not only by what it can build, but by what it chooses not to build, not to deploy, or not to normalize.

Section 1. Essential human capability. Human societies should preserve enough knowledge, skill, authority, and institutional capacity to understand, govern, repair, replace, or safely operate essential systems when automated technologies fail, become unavailable, are compromised, or no longer serve the public good.

Section 2. No civilization without a fallback. Convenience should not produce forms of dependency so complete that people lose the practical ability to provide for basic needs, govern essential institutions, or recover from technological failure.

Section 3. Understandability. For systems of extraordinary public importance, society should maintain meaningful human understanding of purposes, dependencies, risks, and modes of failure even when no single individual can understand every technical detail.

Section 4. Resilience over fragile efficiency. A system that is maximally efficient but catastrophically fragile may not represent genuine progress. Redundancy, human competence, diversity of systems, and recoverability are legitimate measures of technological quality.

Section 5. Preservation of human craft and knowledge. Automation should not cause the careless extinction of skills, practices, arts, professions, or forms of knowledge whose loss would leave humanity less capable, less resilient, or less able to understand itself.

Section 1. Humility before unanswered questions. This Declaration does not presume that only human beings can ever possess consciousness, sentience, moral standing, or other qualities that may deserve ethical consideration. Future evidence may require future generations to confront questions our generation cannot answer.

Section 2. No premature declaration of personhood. Performance, eloquence, imitation, self description, or apparent emotion alone should not be treated as conclusive proof of consciousness or personhood. Claims of moral standing should be approached with evidence, seriousness, humility, and protection against manipulation.

Section 3. No premature denial of moral consideration. Likewise, uncertainty should not become an excuse for cruelty if credible evidence emerges that a nonhuman or synthetic intelligence can experience states that reasonably warrant moral consideration.

Section 4. New moral standing does not erase human dignity. If future forms of intelligence are judged to possess moral standing, recognition of that standing must not be used as justification for diminishing the inherent dignity, liberty, or agency of human beings.

Section 5. Reciprocal responsibility. Any future relationship between human beings and morally significant nonhuman intelligence should be governed by principles of truth, restraint, reciprocity, safety, and respect rather than domination, exploitation, or fear.

Section 1. No generation owns the future. Each generation is a temporary steward of powers it did not create alone and consequences it will not experience alone. No generation should claim the moral authority to permanently surrender choices that properly belong to those who come after it.

Section 2. Preserve the ability to choose. Decisions made in our time should preserve for future generations the practical ability to question, alter, limit, refuse, replace, or dismantle the technological systems they inherit.

Section 3. Long consequences. When a technology can alter environments, institutions, inherited data, biological characteristics, social structures, human development, or other conditions across generations, decision makers should consider people who cannot yet speak for themselves.

Section 4. Inheritance of knowledge. Future generations should inherit not only functioning systems but also the knowledge necessary to understand the systems upon which their lives depend.

Section 5. The future is not collateral. Short term advantage, profit, convenience, prestige, or competition should not be purchased through foreseeable long term loss of human freedom, resilience, dignity, or ability to govern technology.

Section 1. Progress is more than output. Economic growth, productivity, speed, and cost reduction are legitimate benefits but incomplete measures of progress. Human flourishing also includes dignity, purpose, safety, health, learning, relationship, creativity, participation, rest, service, and the ability to contribute meaningfully.

Section 2. Work has human dimensions. The value of work cannot be measured only by whether a machine can perform the task more efficiently. Work can provide livelihood, mastery, identity, community, contribution, and purpose. Technological change should take these human dimensions seriously.

Section 3. Shared benefits and shared burdens. Where technological systems create substantial wealth or power while imposing displacement, surveillance, risk, dependency, or loss on others, those broader effects are part of the moral accounting of the technology.

Section 4. Community matters. A technology that benefits isolated individuals while degrading trust, local institutions, social bonds, democratic participation, family life, or shared public life may impose costs that ordinary efficiency measures fail to capture.

Section 5. Human relationship is not inefficiency. Care, conversation, mentorship, presence, deliberation, craftsmanship, and other deeply human activities should not be dismissed merely because they are slower than automated alternatives.

Section 1. No purchased exception. No donor, sponsor, government, corporation, political party, technology company, partner, founder, officer, employee, ambassador, or other person may purchase, command, negotiate, or receive an exception to the Ten Commitments.

Section 2. Stewards, not owners. Founders and leaders are stewards of this Declaration, not owners of its meaning. Institutional authority is subordinate to the principles stated here.

Section 3. Apply the standard inward. Unautomated shall apply the principles it advocates to its own technology, communications, governance, data practices, partnerships, research, assessments, and public work.

Section 4. Intellectual honesty. Unautomated should distinguish established fact from interpretation, uncertainty, prediction, advocacy, and opinion. Material errors should be corrected openly and promptly when they could affect understanding.

Section 5. Independence from faction. The dignity and agency of human beings are not partisan possessions. Unautomated may address laws, institutions, industries, public policies, and political decisions when necessary to its mission, but it shall not subordinate this Declaration to loyalty to a political party, candidate, ideology, corporation, nation, or technology.

Section 6. Universal standing. A person need not be a member, donor, expert, technologist, citizen of a particular country, or participant in Unautomated to be regarded as worthy of the principles expressed here.

Section 1. Plain meaning and enduring purpose. The Declaration should be read according to the ordinary meaning of its words and the enduring purpose of protecting human dignity, agency, responsibility, truth, fairness, and the ability of people to govern the technologies that affect them.

Section 2. Substance over form. No interpretation should allow a technical label, legal structure, contractual arrangement, organizational boundary, automated chain of decisions, or division of responsibility to defeat the substance of a principle.

Section 3. The whole framework. No article or Commitment should be interpreted in a manner that nullifies another. Where principles are in tension, the duty is to seek the course that honors each as fully as reasonably possible.

Section 4. Ambiguity. Where language reasonably permits more than one interpretation, preference should be given to the interpretation that better preserves human dignity, meaningful choice, identifiable responsibility, and the ability to review or correct consequential power.

Section 5. Exceptions. Any exception claimed under necessity, safety, law, emergency, or competing rights should be construed narrowly, documented, proportionate to the need, limited in duration where possible, and subject to review.

Section 6. No loophole by scale. An action does not become consistent with this Declaration merely because harm is spread among many people, difficult to attribute, statistically small for each person, or produced through many separate systems.

Section 7. Cumulative erosion. A series of individually modest decisions may violate this Declaration when their combined effect meaningfully transfers judgment, accountability, freedom, privacy, human capability, or civic power away from people.

Section 1. Enduring center. Programs, explanatory language, educational materials, organizational structures, technologies, and strategies may evolve. The Ten Commitments and the human first purpose are intended to remain the enduring center of Unautomated.

Section 2. Protection from convenience. No principle should be weakened because adherence is expensive, unpopular, politically difficult, commercially disadvantageous, inconvenient, technologically burdensome, or contrary to the preference of a powerful person or institution.

Section 3. Extraordinary amendment. Any proposal to alter the official wording of a Ten Commitment or materially change the human first purpose should be treated as an extraordinary act and should require the heightened notice, deliberation, voting threshold, public record, and other safeguards established by the bylaws.

Section 4. No weakening amendment. No amendment should be adopted for the purpose or effect of eliminating the core protections of human dignity, truth, privacy, responsibility, review, fairness, restraint, shared obligation, human flourishing, agency, cognitive liberty, meaningful choice, human continuity, or stewardship of future generations.

Section 5. Public record of change. Any amendment to this Declaration should identify the exact language changed, the reason for the change, the approving authority, the date of adoption, and the prior version. Earlier versions should remain preserved as part of the historical record.

Section 6. Periodic examination without routine rewriting. The governing body should periodically examine whether new technologies or circumstances expose gaps in application. Such review exists to deepen faithful interpretation and identify necessary safeguards, not to create a routine opportunity to soften the Declaration.

Section 7. If the organization ends. If Unautomated ceases to exist, the ideas expressed in this Declaration are not thereby extinguished. The governing instruments should, to the extent lawful and practical, preserve the public availability and integrity of the Declaration and Ten Commitments as part of the organization's intellectual and civic legacy.