Summary

This post proposes a reframing of AI alignment away from aligning systems to human values and toward aligning them to preserving the conditions under which humans can continue interacting, disagreeing, and generating meaning without collapsing into terminal outcomes.

The core claim is simple:

AI alignment may be intractable if we try to align systems to human values, because humans themselves are not value-aligned.
However, humans can align around preserving continued playability.

By “playability,” I mean the continued existence of meaningful future interaction: agency without domination, tension without deadlock, stakes without finality, disagreement without annihilation.

The motivating problem

Most alignment approaches implicitly assume one of the following targets:

Align AI to truth or rationality
Align AI to human values or preferences
Align AI to harm minimization or compassion

Each of these runs into the same structural problem:

Humans are not aligned on truth, values, or emotional priorities.

As a result, systems aligned strongly to any one of these dimensions risk becoming amplifiers of existing human conflict rather than stabilizers of civilization.

This is not primarily a technical problem.
It is a coordination problem.

A reframing: alignment to continuation

Instead of asking what AI should believe, value, or optimize for, we can ask a more primitive and more robust question:

Does this action expand or collapse the future space of meaningful interaction?

A concise operational version of this question is:

“Is what you’re doing making the game better or worse for continued playability that keeps generating fun?”

Here, “fun” does not mean comfort or pleasure.
It refers to sustained engagement with agency intact.

Examples:

Conflict that produces learning is playable
Conflict that removes exit ramps is not
Passion that drives exploration is playable
Passion that locks identities into irreversibility is not

This framing does not decide who is right, who is hurt most, or which values should win.
It asks whether future turns still exist.

Why this helps with alignment

This reframing has several advantages:

1. It avoids moral arbitration

The system does not need to determine which beliefs are correct or which values are superior. It only needs to detect whether interaction dynamics are becoming terminal.

2. It avoids emotional arbitration

The system does not need to rank suffering or ...

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