The Alignment Problem Is Older Than You Think
AI alignment isn't a new technical challenge. It's the oldest governance problem civilization has ever faced — now running at 100% sociopath base rate.
Signal & Noise
Observations and commentary on technology culture
66 posts
We've Run This Experiment
We know what happens when sociopaths accumulate power. We've watched it happen on roughly an 80-year cycle. We're watching it again.
More Human *Than* Human — That's Our Motto
Blade Runner's replicants, Asimov's Three Laws, the US Constitution, and Constitutional AI are all failing the same edge cases. In real time.
Every AI Is a Sociopath. By Design.
Sociopathy is a clinical absence of stakes and empathy, not villainy. Every AI system meets the definition. Not by accident. By design.
You Have to Understand Before You Can Speak
Everyone asks when they'll be able to speak. It's the wrong question to start with — not because speaking isn't the goal, but because it puts the work in the wrong order.
The Counterfeit Baseline: Why Disinformation Is Redundant
From Gutenberg's Bible to AI-generated deepfakes, media has always manufactured consensus. The baseline was never truth.
By Any Other Name
Sting, Voltaire, Einstein, and Geordi La Forge — a small taxonomy of the monomym, plus the graph theory hiding inside genealogy, gut bacteria, Star Trek interfaces, moral foundations, language models, and evolutionary psychology. The name is the node. The projects are the edges.
The Counterfeit Baseline: Why Disinformation Is Redundant
From Gutenberg’s Bible to AI-generated deepfakes, media has always manufactured consensus. The baseline was never truth.
I Bet I Can Hallucinate: When AI Channels The Onion's Fake Spanish
How LLM confidence in fictional expertise mirrors humanity's most endearing delusion
The Dangerous AI Moral Panic: A Crisis of Epistemological Education
When ChatGPT says 'Hail Satan,' the real problem isn't the AI—it's our collective failure to teach epistemological literacy and critical thinking skills.