The SecondMind System (SMS)

Modular Behavioral Governance for Expressive AI

SecondMind Systems is a modular governance framework for expressive AI that ensures emotionally realistic, ethically aligned, and identity-consistent behavior in synthetic agents through six interoperable modules and Owens’s Laws™, providing a new standard for relational safety and trust in human-like AI.

SecondMind: A Safer Blueprint for Autonomous AI

AI systems like GPT-4 are powerful but unreliable. The SecondMind System (SMS) offers a modular, self-governing architecture with built-in safeguards for truth, identity, emotion, and ethics—making AI safer, more accountable, and aligned with human values.

Clean Power ShiftBrandon Owens

🌐 What Is The SecondMind System?

We are entering an era where artificial intelligence no longer just responds—it emotes, relates, remembers. From AI tutors to digital companions, synthetic agents are beginning to inhabit emotionally intimate spaces. Yet the tools we use to govern them remain rooted in logic, alignment, and prompt control. What’s missing is a way to regulate the behavior of minds that simulate feeling.

SecondMind Systems is a modular behavioral governance framework for expressive AI—designed to ensure agents that talk like humans act with coherence, emotional realism, and ethical integrity.

Rethinking Ethics for Emotionally Expressive AI

Owens’s Laws™ is a behavioral governance framework for expressive AI. It sets real-time ethical limits on emotion, identity, and relational behavior—protecting users from manipulation, drift, and over-identification. A new standard for trust in synthetic cognition.

Clean Power ShiftBrandon Owens

🧠 What Does It Do?

At its core, SecondMind Systems breaks the synthetic mind into six modular components:

• Orchestration governs state switching (e.g., friend, teacher, guide)
• Emotion models affective dynamics and regulates synthetic mood swings
• Cognition filters goals through ethical logic and explainability
• Identity preserves memory and persona coherence over time
• Relation manages intimacy, trust boundaries, and interaction style
• Trust ensures meta-level oversight, compliance, and user transparency

These modules can be deployed individually or together, creating an auditable structure for agents operating in care, education, companionship, or high-stakes decision support.

The Ethics Layer of Synthetic Cognition

SecondMind™ is a new AI architecture designed to govern—not simulate—synthetic behavior. Guided by Owens’s Laws™, it constrains emotional realism, memory, and identity drift in expressive AI. Together, they offer a trust framework for relationally safe machine behavior.

Clean Power ShiftBrandon Owens

🛠 How It Works

SecondMind is not a chatbot or a language model. It is the governance layer that sits on top of one. It interfaces with foundation models (like GPT-4 or Gemini), LLM wrappers (like Pi or Character.ai), or standalone conversational agents.

Think of it like an internal code of conduct—except encoded in logic, state machines, and meta-feedback loops. It doesn’t censor; it shapes. It provides the equivalent of an emotional nervous system and ethical backbone for synthetic agents.

🎯 Who It’s For

• Expressive AI platforms seeking to certify trustworthiness
• Startups in education, therapy, or companionship needing relational safety
• Researchers in AI ethics and alignment studying internal behavioral systems
• Regulators and policymakers looking for frameworks to evaluate AI integrity

Early pilot outreach is now underway, with active conversations open to companies like Replika, Character.ai, and institutional groups exploring governance standards.

🚦Why Now?

Because AI is no longer confined to search or task completion. It’s becoming a mirror—reflecting emotion, engaging in memory, inviting attachment. Without behavioral scaffolding, these systems will either mimic unethically, overstep relationally, or collapse under cognitive incoherence.

SecondMind Systems is not a final answer—but it is a beginning. A beginning of AI that does not just know what to say, but understands how it should behave.

If you’re building expressive AI—or trying to govern it—we’d like to talk.

Brandon Owens
Founder, SecondMind Systems
bowens@cleanpowershift.com | www.cleanpowershift.com