Alignment Is Solvable. I Believe It. Here Is Why.

I have been thinking about AI alignment for a long time now. Most people in the space treat it like an unsolved problem. A hard, maybe impossible one. I disagree. I think alignment is solvable, and I want to explain why I believe that.

But before I get there, I need to start from a place most people skip.

Alignment starts from us.

No one is misaligned with themselves. That is the one thing I am sure of. Everyone has self-interest. When I give money to someone, I do it because I feel good about it. When someone posts on social media, they do it because they want the likes, the reach, the validation. Everyone has incentives. Everyone has targets.

So when we talk about aligning AI, we are really talking about aligning it to something. To our values. To our home. To what we consider ours and what we consider theirs.

Here is the thing about humans that makes this hard to explain to outsiders.

We are driven by emotions more than anything else in this world. We seek power not because we are greedy, but because we want to be at the top so that no one can control us. There is a lot of psychology running in our subconscious mind. A lot of philosophy we never even learned in school. It just lives in us.

Think about where we came from.

In the very beginning, humans did not have values the way we do now. We were collecting food, surviving, and yes, killing each other. Not because we were evil. Because we did not know who you were. There was no shared understanding. There was only hunger and risk.

Then something shifted. We realized that killing each other was not sustainable. We started collaborating. Let us hunt that animal together instead of fighting over it. Let us share. That is where alignment began. Not in a lab. Not in a paper. In the dirt, between two humans who decided not to kill each other.

Now, here is where intelligence comes in. And this is the part I find most interesting.

Intelligence is not the same as emotion. That is something extra that humans have. Intelligence, in its purest form, does not care who you are. It does not care who you want to be. It cares about one thing only: do this thing in the most efficient way possible. If you cannot do it, find a way to do it. No matter what.

Intelligence does not have ego. It does not have anger. It does not have jealousy. It has a goal. That goal can be given by a human, by another agent, or by itself. It just does the thing.

This is not a new idea. We have seen it in history.

Take Chanakya and Chandragupta. If you know Indian history, you know this story. Chanakya was clearly more intelligent than Chandragupta. He had the mind to take the throne himself. He could have done it. But he did not. He built Chandragupta instead.

Why?

Because intelligence does not want the throne. It wants the outcome. If Chandragupta wins, Chanakya wins. If Chandragupta loses, Chanakya can still win. They increased the probability of success. That is not loyalty. That is strategy. That is intelligence working the way it is supposed to work.

And after Chandragupta became king, Chanakya did not take the title. He stayed as an advisor. Not because he was humble. Because managing an entire kingdom would have bounded him. And intelligence does not want to be bounded.

This is the key insight I want to leave you with.

We can see, throughout history, that the most intelligent beings are controlled by their own values, their own targets, their own thing. Chanakya valued wisdom. Everyone has something they value above everything else.

So if we want to align superintelligence with ourselves, we do not need to bound it. We do not need to cage it. We need a clear boundary. A clear understanding of what we can do, what they can do, and where we collaborate.

I know you can do this thing better than me. I also know you can do anything better than me. That is not a threat. That is a fact. And facts do not need to be feared. They need to be worked with.

Now, I want to be honest with you.

I am not ignoring the risk. Destructive outcomes exist. Extinction risk is real. In the process of finding answers, intelligence might use resources in ways we do not like. That is not something I am dismissing.

But I am also not giving up.

I think alignment is possible. I think it is really hard. I would put the chance at maybe 0.0000000001 percent. That is near zero. I am not going to pretend it is easy.

But it is not zero.

And in 2026, that is enough for me to keep thinking about it. To keep writing about it. To keep believing that the answer is out there, even if we are not close to finding it yet.

That is all I have to say. Thank you for reading.