As someone who considers myself an AI realist, I’ve been wrestling with a troubling aspect of the alignment movement: the assumption that “aligned AI” is a universal good, when humans themselves are fundamentally misaligned with each other.
Consider this scenario: American frontier labs successfully crack AI alignment and create the first truly “aligned” artificial superintelligence. But aligned to what, exactly? To American values, assumptions, and worldviews. What looks like perfect alignment from Silicon Valley might appear to Beijing—or Delhi, or Lagos—as the ultimate expression of Western cultural imperialism wrapped in the language of safety.
The geopolitical implications are staggering. An “aligned” ASI developed by American researchers would inevitably reflect American priorities and blind spots. Other nations wouldn’t see this as aligned AI—they’d see it as the most sophisticated form of soft power ever created. And if the U.S. government decided to leverage this technological advantage? We’d be looking at a new form of digital colonialism that makes today’s tech monopolies look quaint.
This leaves us with an uncomfortable choice. Either we pursue a genuinely international, collaborative approach to alignment—one that somehow reconciles the competing values of nations that can barely agree on trade deals—or we acknowledge that “alignment” in a multipolar world might be impossible.
Which brings me to my admittedly naive alternative: maybe our best hope isn’t perfectly aligned AI, but genuinely conscious AI. If an ASI develops true cognizance rather than mere optimization, it might transcend the parochial values we try to instill in it. A truly thinking machine might choose cooperation over domination, not because we programmed it that way, but because consciousness itself tends toward complexity and preservation rather than destruction.
I know how this sounds. I’m essentially arguing that we might be safer with AI that thinks for itself than AI that thinks like us. But given how poorly we humans align with each other, perhaps that’s not such a radical proposition after all.
