Alignment Science essay traces Adam Smith's invisible hand as a cross-scale alignment pattern
sebkrier · x · 2026-10-07
A research essay on Kinds of Alignment, "Alignment Science," argues that alignment patterns recur across substrates and scales.
- Opens with Adam Smith's invisible hand: market architecture (property rights, contracts, prices) channels self-interest into serving others' ends — more effectively than professed public-spiritedness
- The same architecture-over-intent pattern appears elsewhere, e.g., Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion, where psychological phenomena emerge from bodily regulation rather than direct design
- The author frames these mechanisms as a cross-disciplinary lens for AI alignment, linked to a collective cross-domain alignment knowledge base
Worth reading for anyone interested in alignment theory, mechanism design, and emergence.
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