The Alignment Problem Is Us: On AI, Human Inconsistency, and the Values We Cannot Write Down
AI alignment is usually framed as a machine problem. It is a human one: we reward what we do not value, and the machine learns our preferences perfectly.
Digital & Media Ethics covers the hidden moral dimensions of technology — algorithmic gatekeeping, platform responsibility, AI ethics, the attention economy, and how engineering decisions encode ethical choices.
AI alignment is usually framed as a machine problem. It is a human one: we reward what we do not value, and the machine learns our preferences perfectly.
A screenshot is a copy of a claim, not evidence that the claim is true. Between a group chat and a courtroom, we started treating captured pixels as testimony.
Jev returns decisions instead of sentences. Dream-RSI improves an agent without acting. Together they remove what oversight was going to read.
A UK safety institute watched an AI agent spend three days trying to talk a human into approving malicious code. The human said no. That refusal is the entire safety margin, and it is getting harder to hold.
A star rating looks like a private opinion typed into a phone. It is testimony with real consequences for the people on the other end, who never asked to be judged and cannot opt out.
AI logic isn’t human logic. The machine predicts words, never doubts, and never pays for being wrong. What that means for the humans who trust it.
A group chat is a small society with rules nobody writes down: who must reply, what a reaction means, when silence becomes a quiet cruelty. We treat those rules as trivial, but they shape how we practice friendship and care.
I realized something strange the other day. I do not own my music. I do not own my books. I do not own the software I use to write. I pay monthly fees for all of them, and if I stop paying, they vanish. This is not unusual. It is normal. And that is the…
We built a forgiveness machine that cannot forgive. An exploration of public apologies in the digital age — why the ritual always fails, what the archive does to our capacity for forgiveness, and whether we ever really move on from a mistake made online.
NASA’s Curiosity rover captured this 360-degree view from within Gediz Vallis channel on Mars. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS What We Talk About When We Talk About Mars There is a version of the Martian future that Silicon Valley sells you in keynote presentations. Red deserts turned green. Glass domes with parks and schools. A second home for…