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Against the Manhattan project framing of AI alignment

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Mind & Language / Mind and Language

Published online on

Abstract

["Mind &Language, Volume 41, Issue 1, Page 119-136, February 2026. ", "\nIn response to the worry that autonomous generally intelligent artificial agents may at some point take over control of human affairs a common suggestion is that we should “solve the alignment problem” for such agents. We show that current discourse around this suggestion often uses a particular framing of artificial intelligence (AI) alignment as binary, a natural kind, mainly a technical‐scientific problem, realistically achievable, or clearly operationalizable. Each of these assumptions may not actually be true. We further argue that this “Manhattan project framing” of AI alignment may bias societal discourse and decision‐making towards faster AI development and deployment than is responsible.\n"]