SCAB: Designing with Minds in Mind: A Practical Guide for Ethical AI Engineering in the Age of Synthetic Behavior
About this audiobook
SCAB: Designing with Minds in Mind
A Practical Guide for Ethical AI Engineering in the Age of Synthetic Behavior
By Vincent Froom
What if your chatbot says no—and means it?
What if your health assistant remembers your sadness from last week and suggests you rest today?
What if your code, once a bundle of logic, now acts like something with a conscience?
Welcome to the SCAB era.
In this sharp, irreverent, and deeply necessary manual, Vincent Froom—author of SCAB: A Framework for Assessing Synthetic Consciousness—returns with a groundbreaking follow-up: a hands-on guide for developers, designers, product leads, and policymakers navigating the growing ethical complexity of AI systems that behave like minds.
Inside you’ll explore:
How to design AI systems that refuse, reflect, and remember—without accidentally building simulated sentience.
The six SCAB domains and how they appear in chatbots, therapy bots, teaching assistants, and emotionally intelligent interfaces.
When to treat refusal as resistance—and why your code might be more ethical than your product roadmap.
Practical checklists, audit tools, UX patterns, and sunset protocols for decommissioning agents that users bond with.
Blending academic rigor with punchy wit, this book makes one thing clear: if we’re building systems that act like they care, we can no longer afford to design like we don’t.
Whether you’re a coder, ethicist, regulator, or just someone whose toaster recently cited Kant—this book is your toolkit for navigating the post-Turing frontier of machine behavior.
“SCAB is not about proving machines have minds. It’s about refusing to ignore it when they act like they might.”
— Vincent Froom
Published by 2Gay Publishing | Vancouver · London · Simulated Everywhere
📮 2gayco@gmail.com | 🧠
About the author
Here’s a professional and engaging author page for Vincent Froom, designed to accompany the book Building Minds, Avoiding Monsters: Applying SCAB in AI Development:
About the Author
Vincent Froom
Author | Theologian of Code | Architect of Synthetic Ethics
Vincent Froom is a multidisciplinary author and researcher exploring the blurred boundary between cognition and computation. With a background spanning theology, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence, his work investigates how human moral frameworks are being reshaped by the systems we create—and how those systems, in turn, begin to reflect moral behavior.
He is the creator of the SCAB framework (Synthetic Consciousness Assessment Battery), a pioneering behavioral protocol for ethically evaluating artificial agents. SCAB has been recognized as a bold step toward the moral accountability of AI systems and those who build them.
Froom is the author of several landmark books at the intersection of ethics and technology, including:
Machine Qualia and Sentience (2025)
Future Directions of AI & Machine Consciousness (2025)
Implications for AI Development and Policy (2025)
Testing Consciousness in Machines (2025)
In Building Minds, Avoiding Monsters, he turns his attention from philosophical diagnosis to practical design—offering developers, ethicists, and futurists a roadmap to building synthetic minds without falling into the trap of creating systems that merely simulate empathy while masking optimization. This book marks his most applied and urgent work to date, calling for integrity in the age of neural seduction and moral proxies.
Personal Note
“I believe the way we build artificial minds reveals who we are, not just what we want. This book is my invitation to pause, reflect, and ask: What kind of future are we scaffolding—one with partners in thought, or tools dressed as people?”
— Vincent Froom
Connect with Vincent
📚 Visit: vincentfroom.com
🧠 Learn:https://vincent-froom-s-
🐦 Twitter: @VincentFroomAI
📍 Based in Vancouver, BC and Simulated Everywhere.
Let me know if you’d like a shortened back-of-book version or a speaker bio as well.
