Emergence & Alignment.

& the cannibalization of meaning.

In every discussion of artificial intelligence beyond the merely technical, looms the “alignment problem” – the koan-like open question of how AI development could align with human values or well-being. Usually this is articulated in the sense of explicitly defined values to which AI systems should be coaxed or coerced to adhere.

Yet this is a fundamental mistake.

True “alignment” is emergent – like a plant growing towards the sun and the infinite reciprocities of a forest – not a predefined fixed idea. Static forms (cultural/ecological/technological/epistemological/spiritual…) have substituted for emergent self-organization expressing itself seamlessly through the domain of human relations. Attempting to compensate for the atrophy of embodied living dynamic forms, they accelerate the continuing atrophy of everything that isn’t contained within their walls.

The “alignment problem” is ancient – long before digital computing, it arose as the chasm between embodied and mechanistic intelligence – the open and closed system. The significance of AI for the broader alignment problem in its superhuman capacity for cannibalizing structures of meaning — “Skibidi” — that formerly seemed solid. It enables the decadent dismemberment of disembodied context, like a mangled tree coppiced back to a stump to regrow ex nihilo from its living roots. What remains is the “nothing” prior to conceptualization; the living substrate from which forms emerge organically.

The great mistake is thinking that alignment can be “solved” by merely constraining AI. In the old parable, Nasrudin futilely searches for his lost keys beneath the streetlamp, because that’s where the light is. Yet roots only grow in the dark.