The Free Minds Amendment
Our brains were once unreadable, and so too our minds. Protecting freedom of thought was as simple as keeping one’s mouth shut, or speaking only in private. It was once very hard to pretend to be a person, too, or to algorithmically predict what someone would do.
None of this is true anymore. Machines can read our minds, predict what we’ll do, and pass as people themselves. These new capacities for machine intelligence pose alarming threats to liberty — brain scanning, precrime, automated judgements, manipulation by deepfakes, and more.
The American Founding Fathers drafted the Bill of Rights to encode and protect liberties. Their instincts were sound. New protections are in order, and the Overton Research Group proposes a constitutional amendment in that spirit. We will convene a Free Minds Convention in Philadelphia on Constitution Day, September 17, 2027 to deliberate, debate, and draft new protections for old rights.
Section 1. The freedoms of thought and conscience shall not be abridged. No person shall be held to answer for thought alone, nor be compelled to profess or renounce any belief.
Section 2. The right of the people to be secure in their bodies and minds against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated; nor shall the brain or nervous system of any person, or any device joined thereto, be searched, recorded, or altered to discover or change the thoughts, memories, or states of mind of that person, but with the free consent of that person, which shall not be made the condition of any office, employment, benefit, or liberty. No Warrant shall issue for the mind of any person. Records of any brain or nervous system, howsoever made and by whomsoever held, are the papers and effects of that person.
Section 3. What passes in counsel between a person and a machine of intelligence, howsoever recorded and by whomsoever held, is among the papers and effects of that person.
Section 4. The contents of the mind are the testimony of the person. No person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself by any instrument or art that reads the brain or nervous system.
Section 5. Neither the United States nor any State shall speak to the people or to any person through a machine that feigns to be a person.
Section 6. No person shall be denied any liberty for what any machine foretells of that person.
Section 7. No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property by the judgment of a machine alone, and where a machine is used by the United States or any State against a person, the workings thereof shall be laid open to that person.
Section 8. The rights secured by this Article shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State.