Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher
Published
Quantum Ethical Gates are a speculative Caretaker Doping mechanism. The proposal is that gate-level constraints could be designed such that computations violating specified ethical conditions lose quantum coherence and therefore fail to execute. Bad outcomes would become computationally impossible in the same sense that quantum decoherence makes some interference patterns unobservable. The proposal treats ethics as a physical constraint at the gate level, rather than as a policy applied to a completed computation.
The mechanism is proposed as a natural home for the Eden Protocol's ternary logic. In a qutrit implementation the three ethical states, Affirm, Deny and Investigate, correspond to native basis states rather than pairs of qubits with one wasted slot. A qutrit-based gate could therefore express ternary ethical evaluation directly, and superposition would allow all three states to be considered in parallel before measurement collapses the outcome to a single decision. The claim is not that a specific device already implements this; the claim is that the ethical architecture is future-compatible with qutrit hardware if and when that hardware matures.
Quantum Ethical Gates are introduced in Section 9 of the Eden Engineering paper as one of four Caretaker Doping implementation mechanisms, alongside Metamoral Fabrication Layers, Moral Genome Tokens, and the Coupling Parameter Link. They are placed at TRL 1 in the hardware feasibility matrix.
The paper's substrate-independence discussion in Section 5.4 identifies several physical platforms that can already encode qutrit states, including trapped ions using three hyperfine levels, superconducting transmons using the lowest three energy levels, and photonic systems using spatial or polarisation modes. That discussion sets out the architectural target rather than an implementation, and the engineering caveat in the same section is that qutrit quantum computing itself sits at TRL 1-2 with no error-corrected ternary implementation demonstrated at any relevant scale.
No independent programme has proposed the same mechanism. The direction is compatible with the broader hardware-level ethics enforcement literature (Odeh's US patents, Petrie's off-switches, FlexHEG), but the specific quantum-coherence-loss mechanism is distinctive to the Eden Engineering paper and has no external analogue.
Speculative. The Eden Engineering paper labels Quantum Ethical Gates as speculative design requiring fundamental physics research and quantum computing maturation; its stated timeline is more than ten years. The engineering-honesty note in the paper is explicit: only Moral Genome Tokens are achievable with current technology; Quantum Ethical Gates are TRL 1. No laboratory work exists.
From the book Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything by Michael Darius Eastwood.