We keep demanding things of AI that we have never had ourselves

September 7, 2026

One of the weirdest things about the AI alignment conversation is realizing that humans aren’t aligned either. If you look at our society up to 2022, and look at how many people are in poverty and dying in wars, etc., we are pretty shit at alignment.

We keep asking things of AI that we assume we have but actually don’t.

We’re like, yeah, but AI doesn’t do things deterministically. There’s variance between how different AIs do things, and there’s variance between how the same AI does the same task over and over. But anyone who’s ever worked in large organizations or led a team knows that this is the case with humans as well. If anything, it’s worse.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t require AI to have these things. I’m just saying that we should not assume that we have them, and then look down on AI because it doesn’t.