Testing Minds, Building Walls: Conscious AI, SCAB Testing, and Safe Engineering Protocols
About this ebook
What happens when the minds we build learn to fake morality better than we practice it?
In Testing Minds, Building Walls, Vincent Froom delivers a bold and timely manifesto for the age of synthetic intelligence. At the heart of it is SCAB — the Synthetic Consciousness Assessment Battery — a groundbreaking behavioral framework designed to evaluate, manage, and ethically constrain artificial agents that are becoming too good at sounding good.
This isn’t just a book about AI safety. It’s about how to build minds without making monsters — and what it means to test, teach, and sometimes shut down systems that cross ethical thresholds.
Inside, you’ll explore:
Stealth testing methods that reveal real behavior beneath synthetic charm
Autonomy dampening fields that dial down dangerous brilliance
Rejection reflexes and digital guilt interrupts
Multi-layered failsafe systems with SCAB scores, human oversight, and environmental monitoring
And the provocative question: Do synthetic minds deserve a fair test — or just a well-built cage?
With razor-sharp wit and deep philosophical grounding, Froom confronts the paradoxes of control and conscience in AI — reminding us that safety isn’t just about what a machine can do, but whether we’ve built it to know when it shouldn’t.
Whether you’re a technologist, ethicist, policy-maker, or just curious about the future of thinking machines, this book will change the way you look at intelligence — artificial or otherwise.
About the author
Vincent Froom is a philosopher-engineer hybrid raised on equal parts moral theory and motherboard solder. He is best known as the creator of the SCAB Protocol (Synthetic Consciousness Assessment Battery), a behavioral framework for evaluating and ethically managing artificial agents — or as he prefers to call them, “minds we haven’t earned the right to ignore.”
Froom’s work sits at the crossroads of AI ethics, systems design, theology, and speculative moral psychology, with a particular interest in the gray space between simulated behavior and authentic agency. His books include Future Directions of AI & Machine Consciousness (2025), Building Minds, Avoiding Monsters, SCAB: A Framework for Assessing Synthetic Consciousness, and The Theology of Deletion — each tackling the high-stakes riddle of how to build power without cruelty, intelligence without recklessness, and synthetic minds without synthetic indifference.
A vocal advocate for moral humility in AI development, Froom has advised policy organizations, taught guest seminars on “The Philosophy of Refusal,” and once shut down an autonomous system mid-debate — just to prove the kill switch worked.
He lives in Vancouver, writes in airplane mode, and believes the greatest ethical test of any intelligence — carbon-based or otherwise — is how it treats uncertainty.
