After Alignment

What does it mean to ask machine intelligence to “align” to human wishes and self-image? Is this a useful tactic for design, or a dubious metaphysics that obfuscates how intelligence as a whole might evolve? Given that AI and the philosophy of AI have evolved in a tight coupling, informing and delimiting one another, how should we rethink this framework in both theory and practice? The emergence of machine intelligence must be steered toward planetary sapience in the service of viable long term futures. Instead of strong alignment with human values and superficial anthropocentrism, the steerage of AI means treating these humanisms with nuanced suspicion, and recognizing its broader potential. At stake is not only what AI is, but what a society is, and what AI is for. What should align with what? Synthetic intelligence refers to the wider field of artificially-composed intelligent systems that do and do not correspond to Humanism’s traditions. These systems, however, can complement and combine with human cognition, intuition, creativity, abstraction and discovery. Inevitably, both are forever altered by such diverse amalgamations. In After Alignment, Benjamin Bratton discusses shifts from AGI to artificial generic intelligence, the importance of recursive simulations, the decentering of personal data, the challenges of AI in science, intelligence as an evolutionary scaffold, the limitations of mainstream AI ethics, and why a planetary model of synthetic intelligence must drive its geopolitical project.