Failed Architectures of Law

Two constitutional anti-patterns are rejected. First, delegating governance to a goal-maximizing AI (“maximize happiness,” “maximize health”) invites Goodhart disasters and authoritarian optimization. Second, drafting exhaustive rulebooks with thousands of clauses creates brittle complexity that cannot adapt to novel technologies or crises.

Unscarcity instead adopts concise Foundational Principles plus adaptable Guiding Axioms, leaving room for context-aware judgment. The lessons draw from historical constitutions overloaded with exceptions that later justified abuses, and from alignment research showing that narrow objectives produce unintended behavior.

By naming these failures, the framework anchors why transparency and power decay are non-negotiable constraints rather than policy preferences.

References

• UnscarcityBook, chapter3
• Karl Popper, “The Open Society and Its Enemies” (1945)
• Stuart Russell, “Human Compatible” (2019)