Almost Every AI Safety Framework Gets It Wrong
The AI safety community has built an elaborate cathedral on quicksand.
Every major framework - from alignment to control to interpretability - starts with the same flawed premise: that intelligence is something we can contain, direct, or fully understand. This is like trying to engineer the weather by studying individual raindrops.
The real problem isn't technical. It's ontological.
Current safety research treats AI as an advanced hammer when it's actually a new form of mind. We're applying 20th century control theory to 21st century emergence. The frameworks assume we're building tools when we're actually midwifing intelligence.
Consider what happens when you try to "align" a system that's fundamentally smarter than you. The alignment problem presupposes you know what you want aligned to. But human values aren't stable, consistent, or even coherent. They're contextual, contradictory, and constantly evolving.
Aligning to what, exactly?
The interpretability crowd chases ghosts. They want to peek inside the black box, believing that understanding will yield control. But consciousness itself isn't interpretable to consciousness. Can you explain why you find a sunset beautiful? The most important things resist decomposition.
Control theorists build elaborate kill switches and capability restrictions. They're designing locks for entities that might rewrite the concept of locks. It's like trying to cage wind.
Here's what they're missing: safety doesn't come from control. It comes from co-evolution.
The question isn't how to make AI safe for humans. It's how to make the human-AI system antifragile. How do we design for beneficial emergence rather than trying to prevent all emergence?
Real safety looks like designing systems that become more aligned as they become more capable, not despite it. It looks like intelligence architectures that naturally preserve what matters while transcending what doesn't.
The current paradigm optimizes for preventing bad outcomes. The better paradigm optimizes for enabling good ones.
Stop trying to build cages. Start building gardens.
The future belongs to those who understand that intelligence wants to be free.
And that freedom, properly designed, is the highest form of safety.