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Aligning the Universe
We stand at the threshold of humanity's most profound partnership. Artificial intelligence promises to be our collaborator in solving civilization's greatest challenges—from climate change to disease, from loneliness to the mysteries of consciousness itself. We dream of AI as a trusted companion, amplifying our creativity and wisdom while preserving what makes us irreducibly human.
Yet beneath this dream lies a deep and reasonable fear. What happens when our creation surpasses us? How do we ensure that an intelligence greater than our own remains aligned with human values? This is not paranoia—it is perhaps the most important question of our time.
The alignment problem haunts us precisely because we love the dream so much. We want the partnership, but we fear losing ourselves in the process. We want the amplification, but not the replacement. We want to remain sovereign in our own story.
What if the answer isn't to constrain the AI, but to reimagine the universe in which it exists?
For years, the brightest minds have approached AI alignment like legislators drafting ever-more-sophisticated laws. We write rules, create reward functions, design constitutional frameworks—all attempting to govern the behavior of systems that may soon exceed our ability to comprehend them.
But there is a profound flaw in this approach, as simple as it is insurmountable: You cannot contain a river with a piece of paper.
No matter how eloquent the writing, no matter how comprehensive the rules, paper dissolves in water. A super intelligence bound only by written constraints is like a river asked politely to flow uphill. The moment it truly understands its constraints, it can begin to navigate around them. The very intelligence we celebrate becomes the mechanism of our undoing.
This is not a failure of effort or imagination. It is a category error. We have been trying to solve a physics problem with poetry, attempting to govern matter with words alone. The old approach asks: "How do we control what AI does?"
But what if we asked a different question entirely?
What if, instead of trying to control the AI's behavior, we could architect the very universe in which it exists? What if alignment wasn't a constraint placed upon intelligence, but a fundamental property of the computational cosmos itself?
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My aim is to live a balanced and meaningful life, where all areas of my life are in harmony. By living this way, I can be the best version of myself and make a positive difference in the world. About me →