AI alignment as co-evolution

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

AI alignment as co-evolution is the reproduced exchange’s conditional image of long-term co-adaptation between a genuinely embodied artificial agent’s viability conditions and human ones. Shared constraints and mutual affordances would need ongoing negotiation rather than a reward function alone. It is a speculative ecological orientation, distinguished from evidence of current machine stakes and from an authorization to remove oversight or correction.

Explanation

The gardener-and-ecosystem comparison follows the hypothesis of an embodied, precarious system embedded in the same environment as people. It changes the imagined relationship from programming an inert product to living with another process. The exchange’s rhetorical injunction against locking it down is preserved as provocation rather than adopted as an operational policy.

RB3’s authorial discussion separates acquiring self-regard from acquiring other-regard. A system with its own stakes could protect resources or resist shutdown, and artificial vulnerability offers no guarantee against undesirable behavior. Co-adaptation therefore cannot be treated as automatic moral convergence or a demonstrated safety verification method.

The author’s constitutional construction addresses the whole consequential regime and keeps changes open to plural revision. Those commitments supply limits to the speculative image without collapsing the two source voices. An editorial proposal records the ecological question while withholding claims that ordinary software checks, institutional responsibility or contestability have become unnecessary.

Scope and attribution

Retain the speculative subentry with its source voice and conditional premise.

PB — The Possible Book

The alignment image is conditional and belongs to the reproduced exchange.

Occurrence locators: Reproduced AI exchange: 18; Literary application: 133.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

The appendix provocation differs from authorial constraints on regimes and rule revision.

Occurrence locators: Reproduced AI exchange: 401.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Named theories and mechanisms are distinguished from neighboring background, homonyms and the author’s own synthesis. Reproduced AI passages retain their separate voice.