Civic Capacities Alignment Introduced in Civic AI Theoretical Context: Alignment Traditions and the Missing Civic Layer

This work introduces Civic Capacities Alignment, a distinct theoretical framework for the civic conditions under which AI alignment can become democratically usable. Civic Capacities Alignment is the intentional structuring of complementarity among different kinds of civic capacity. Contemporary AI alignment research has developed along several productive lines: long-termist concern with existential risk and technical control; justice-first documentation of automated harm in public administration; political-economy critique of behavioral data extraction; and design ethics centered on attention and individual agency. Each illuminates an essential facet of the alignment problem. This work argues, however, that one operating layer has not been sufficiently treated as a primary design target: the civic infrastructure through which democratic societies perceive, interpret, contest, and respond to emerging harms. Within this framework, Non-Agentic Civic AI may extend the human ability to observe, preserve, organize, compare, translate, and inquire across complex digital civic conditions. Human beings retain moral and democratic primacy: they determine what those observations mean, what obligations they disclose, and what responsibilities and lawful actions should follow. The alignment sought is therefore not an alignment of machine values with civic values, nor an attempt to model, predict, or represent collective democratic conscience. It is a constitutional division of labor between illumination and judgment: AI illuminates. Humans judge. Lawful institutions decide. Its practical expression is Civic Visibility Public Infrastructure: rights-bounded public institutions, procedures, data practices, and non-agentic instruments designed to preserve public records, reveal aggregate patterns, identify system-level pressures, and help institutions and communities recognize emerging conditions earlier. Such systems must categorically refuse to score individuals, recommend policy outcomes, trigger enforcement, or exercise delegated governmental judgment. The governing aim is moral visibility: the practical capacity of a free society to perceive consequential patterns, emerging harms, uncertainty, accountability pathways, and system-level drift in time to deliberate. Moral visibility is treated not merely as an individual virtue, a media-literacy outcome, or an informational preference, but as public infrastructure that must be built, funded, explained, audited, corrected, and, where necessary, stopped. The framework joins a Benjamin Franklin–inspired public-works ethic with a John Dewey–inspired ethic of democratic inquiry. Franklin’s legacy supplies the practical imperative to build durable civic instruments; Dewey’s democratic philosophy requires that those instruments remain communicative, publicly intelligible, corrigible, and accountable to the people whose shared conditions they illuminate. James C. Scott’s warning about administrative legibility provides a central constitutional constraint. Civic Visibility Public Infrastructure must not make citizens more legible to power. Rather, it must make power, risk, uncertainty, and institutional responsibility more legible to citizens, communities, and accountable public servants. Its purpose is not to create more detailed administrative representations of people, but to help a democratic public recognize consequential institutional patterns without converting citizens into objects of surveillance, scoring, prediction, or control. The work also offers a preliminary institutional design for critique and empirical examination: the Franklin–Dewey–Citizenry Civic Data Observatory System. This public-works proposal is intended for limited pilots, public explanation, independent audit, challenge by affected communities, revision in light of evidence, and termination where it fails democratic, constitutional, or rights-preserving tests. Civic Capacities Alignment does not claim to solve AI alignment. It identifies a prior civic condition under which technical, regulatory, and philosophical alignment work can become usable within democratic self-government: societies must retain enough shared visibility to understand and govern the systems shaping their common life. This work is offered as an invitation to researchers, engineers, public institutions, civic organizations, and democratic theorists to test whether non-agentic, rights-preserving civic infrastructure can strengthen collective human judgment without automating moral authority or centralizing coercive power. It is presented in the e-book series Non-Agentic Civic AI — Illuminating America’s Civic Digital Field.