Nollind Whachell

The Solution to the AI Alignment Problem Is in the Mirror

We worry about aligning AI with our values—but what if the real challenge is aligning humanity first? A reflection on intelligence, truth, and the mirror.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/tech-happy-life/202505/the-solution-to-the-ai-alignment-problem-is-in-the-mirror

Mike Brooks has a phenomenal post on Psychology Today that touches upon a lot of points that I myself have been discovering in using AI to assist with my own psychological growth and development, especially since AI can help us to become aware of the limited worldview lenses we are looking at life through and thus learn to see beyond them.

Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson nailed it: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” Our brains, wired for 150-person tribes, now navigate a hyper-connected world. This evolutionary mismatch fuels cognitive biases that turn online debate into digital civil war.

This pretty much captures the issues of our world today. Everything is out of alignment.

This kind of reminds of Charlie Chaplin’s speech in the movie The Great Dictator in which he says the following. “We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost…”

The “AI Alignment Problem” asks: How do we ensure AI upholds human values? But the question is really, “Which values?” East or West? Left or Right? Christian, Jew, Muslim, or atheist? The reality is: We can’t align AI until we align with each other.

It’s like the saying goes. Everybody wants to save the world but they all have a different ways of doing it. What vertical development helps us to understand is the larger context of life. Like we no longer see left or right as political stances but just different stages of growth that are often competing against each other rather than being in alignment with each other.

Why? Because it would be like saying an adult is superior to a child. Yet for an adult to become an adult they have to be a child first. So no child, no adult.

So it’s not about saying my perspective is right and yours is wrong. It is recognizing how each perspective is essential for each aspect of your growth and development.

Here’s an example of this in terms of politics. You can’t focus on addressing higher order needs of people (i.e. left perspective) until lower order needs are met (i.e. right perspective).

Like a lot times politicians will focus on pie in the sky stuff that’s lays out a better vision of how people can creatively thrive but the vision is often completely outside of a lot of people’s vision because they’re just trying to economically survive from day to day.

So again, until people’s lower order survival needs are met, they won’t really be able to focus on their higher order, creative thriving needs. But most politicians miss this because they’re often not living the same reality of most their constituents.

Yet at the same time, it’s also realizing it’s not a zero sum game. Both lower order needs and higher order needs can be addressed at the same time, if the leader has the capacity to deal with the complexity of doing so. It’s just that rarely do you see a leader at this latter, evolved stage of psychological development that can achieve this.

Here’s the paradox: AI sees us as one species, but our tribal fights play a cacophony, not a symphony. We send wildly contradictory signals about who we are and what we value. We demand AI respect human life, then program drones to kill. We insist on truth, then spread misinformation and create deepfakes. We can’t tell AI who we are—because we haven’t agreed on it ourselves.

What’s even more difficult about the above is that through our growth and development, who we are is constantly changing, even though we may not realize this until we actually reflect upon it.

What if, instead of using AI to find more “intelligent” ways to attack one another, we instead use it to help us seek and understand truth/reality? If it is true that truth sets us free, then that means the deeper the truths we find together, the freer we become. In this way, the truth unites us, and the house united will not fall.

This is how I’m using it with my own growth and development. I pose queries that question my assumptions and beliefs and ask the AI to help me see what I may be perceptual blind to, thus making something normally invisible to me visible. I usually achieve this by describing how I’m transitioning between two stages of development and asking the AI to assist me in understanding the change of context in the perception of both.

Rather than treating alignment as a rigid code to enforce, we can approach it as an evolving dialogue—one that grows as both humans and AI deepen in understanding.

This relational view shifts our focus from control to collaboration. When educators use AI to help students explore opposing viewpoints on complex issues—like immigration or Middle Eastern conflicts—something powerful happens. Beneath the surface-level differences, shared human concerns emerge: safety, belonging, fairness. In that exchange, truth becomes co-discovered—not dictated.

The best way I could describe the above is to think about the proliferation of people using Google to find information and knowledge today. It’s become so common that it’s the norm. Don’t know something? Google it.

What AI allows us to do now is to query something that we think we may “know” but we may actually not know the true meaning of it. In effect, based upon your stage of psychological development, you will often be looking through a worldview lens that can misinterpret our understanding of reality.

So by clarifying our understanding of something through AI, we can verify if we are interpreting it correctly from our current point of vantage of life.

But guess what’s the main thing stopping us from using AI in this way?

Ourselves.

This is how our limited worldviews work, especially in relation to our ego. We often just assume what we know and believe to be the “truth” and “right,” even though it may not be. And thus we don’t bother validating our assumptions and beliefs, because “we know we obviously are right.”

This is the exact same reason why most people don’t even use Google today anymore. They just assume they’re “right”…because they don’t want to be “wrong.”

So we all walk around believing delusions that we think are reality…just like AI can hallucinate and believe something is right as well. (BTW this is why I always like to look and understand something from multiple perspectives rather than just one, as it help to self-validate and reveal discrepancies that I may have missed from looking at it from just one perspective.)

Imagine systems that help us see beyond tribal lines. That help us remember our shared humanity. That help us love our neighbors as ourselves—not just in principle, but in practice.

This is what vertical development really reveals to us. It shows the arc of our potential growth and development as a human being and, at the same time, reveal how we are all the same person deep down inside (i.e. we are all seeking the same basic psychological needs of safety and belonging).

I’m becoming aware of something.

These moments of feeling inadequate in life are often natural steps within a larger process towards feeling empowered.

I was trying to think of a way that I could describe this and I think this scene from Man of Steel metaphorically articulates it quite well.

In this scene, we see Superman testing out his new powers that he has just gained. And interestingly, the suit he dons embodies the new larger role that he is playing but one that he may not feel confident in playing at first (i.e. imposter complex).

Initially we see him take a multitude of massively large bounding steps and then leap into the sky to attempt to fly.

With a little bit of wavering, he does seem to be able to fly and laughs ecstatically (2:00) at the empowering feeling of the experience.

But then no sooner than having a feeling of elation, he falters (2:05), loses control, and then crashes back down to earth in an epic fail fashion (2:15).

This perfectly embodies what I’ve been going through within my life, especially over the last decade.

It’s like I get these peak feelings of epic elation, where I discover something new and I feel like I’ve figured everything out. Only to coming crashing back down to earth and even plow deep into the ground feeling just as depressed as I was high from the previous elation because I realize I haven’t figure everything out.

So imagine Superman repeatedly attempting to do this many times, with each attempt being slightly better and slightly less worse than the last time.

But then there is this moment, where everything shifts.

It’s a moment where you don’t leap into action but just sit there, reflecting back (2:35) upon all previous attempts and you suddenly realize and become aware of something that you weren’t aware of before (2:45). Not something out there but something within you. An invisible sun at your core, that can empower you in ways you never dreamed possible before.

So it’s a moment that’s less about doing something, as it is about being something (3:00). It’s a moment of just sinking in and immersing within your presence, your true sense of self and being, that’s been with you all along but you just never realized it until you fully became aware of it by reflecting back upon it.

And then after this buildup of presence, reflecting upon who you fully are, you explode forwards and take flight (3:10), truly soaring and being your true self.

And in doing so, you are able to fly above the terrain you’ve previously been jumping around (3:25) and you fully get it now as a whole because you get yourself as a whole. In effect, you are the terrain you’ve previously been jumping around and trying to map out, so as to make sense of yourself in a larger way.

This lets you fully zoom out and float way above the world(view) of yourself (4:05), giving you a perspective of your larger sense of Self that you’ve never had before. You see a whole new world(view) of yourself.

So you don’t just see the potential of yourself anymore, as a whole new world of possibilities.

You actually become that potential.

I’ve mentioned before that I like showing the inner workings of how I work through things (ie showing ChatGPT conversations) because it may help someone else undergoing the same journey and process.

But over the last couple of days, I’ve realized it goes way beyond this and helps me in ways that I can’t even fully comprehend in this moment right now.

What I mean is that it will help my future self in reflecting back and making sense of things that I was struggling with in this moment.

This is because you often don’t make sense of things and see the deeper meaning of them in the moment. It only emerges when reflecting back and seeing a larger scope of patterns over time, thus seeing how they all connect up.

This is an embodiment of Steve Jobs famous quote.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Steve Jobs

This is why I find it important to record things that might seem inconsequential in the moment but in the long run may be a defining moment that unlocks so much of my life and my understanding of it.

And more importantly, in doing so, it allows us to see where we have crossed over into new terrain, exploring a larger stage of psychological development that we might not have been aware of otherwise.

This happened to me back in 2015 when I didn’t realize I had shifted into a new stage of psychological development until recently over the past six months or so.

In effect, by reflecting upon my life in a conversation with ChatGPT, this realization and awareness came to light.

This shows how continual repeated reflections are essential for growth and development, otherwise you might be missing something that’s under your very nose because you’re perceptually blind to it.

There’s something tugging on my brain with regards to my last post and I’m trying to figure out what it is.

I know it has something to do with work but I’m not sure in what way.

For example, Dave Gray mentioned that for his School of the Possible, he wanted people who understood their purpose and were able to express it. And in expressing their purpose, he wanted them to be able to create a course for it, so they could teach it within his school, thus allowing that person’s purpose to actually become their work and livelihood.

There’s something about this though that feels off.

Not in terms of wanting to achieve this goal, as I think it is a noble achievement.

No, it has to do with how difficult the reality of this is.

For example, what I’ve noticed is that within my life, the first half was focused on technology and the second half is focused on sociology. And even though technology can be difficult for people to grasp, it’s much more approachable and understandable to people than sociology.

In effect, it’s easy to talk to people about technologies that are invisible to them (i.e. Wifi) but it seems monumentally more difficult to talk to people about psychology that is an invisible foundation to their lives.

What I’m trying to get at here is when a person make a shift in their work that also underpins a shift in their perception of life (i.e. worldview), that is a monumental leap to make.

Like people can grasp when I talk about computers and the Web. However, when I talk about stages of development, levels of consciousness, and worldviews though, most people don’t know about these things, even though they are foundational to their lives.

Now what’s strange about this though is that shift probably feels just as a much foreign to someone who works for an employer and then they suddenly start thinking about perhaps going freelance and start working for themselves.

In other words, just becoming a freelancer is a monumental shift in someone’s life and worldview.

It’s a step that requires a massive amount of courage but the payoff, both in terms of self-reliance and also in terms of living and embodying values of freedom and autonomy, are enormous.

Anyways, that’s all I wanted to say.

In effect, I think the enormous leaps we need to make in the future don’t require someone to understand their purpose in life at such a high level of consciousness initially. I think it really just requires someone wanting to make the next step and become more independent and self-reliant in their work lives, thus no longer feeling like the need to work for an employer and feel trapped within a relationship that isn’t conducive to their own growth and development.

So it’s really about creating a community that at a basic level is helping people to make that first big step in becoming an independent freelancer.

Yet at the same time, the community at a deeper level can be about helping people to understand their purpose over time and thus evolve themselves and their work at the same time.

BTW some examples of this would be Tiago Forte’s “productivity” focused work which is really just a Trojan horse for growth and development. The same could be said of Chris Do’s work which appears to be about design work but again is just a Trojan horse for growth and development as well.

I guess even though Sri and myself want to create similar communities that have a Trojan horse of some kind as an entry point that eventually leads to growth and development, the key difference with us is that we both seem to enjoy using gaming metaphors to describe our communities and the approaches used within them.

When I read this question above by Sri Seah that emerged from some deep reflection by them, I immediately thought of two things.

Making the Invisible Visible

The first thing I thought of was a quote by Beau Lotto from his book Deviate.

The best technologies make the invisible visible.

Such technologies open up new understanding, transforming the ideas that we have about our world and ourselves. They not only challenge what they assume to be true already, they also offer the opportunity for a new, larger, more complex set of assumptions.

Bea Lotto, Deviate

Imagining a World of Play

And the second thing I thought of was a statement I created some years back that describes the arc of my life.

This arc began decades back playing within imaginary worlds in role-playing games and MMORPGs. And it spans to today where I’m wanting to imagine and build a newer worldview, one embodying play. But play at a much deeper level than most people conventionally perceive it as.

Here are some quotes below that touch upon this deeper level of play which to me is essential for transformational growth and development because this play allows one to creatively step outside of one’s “self” into a larger sense of “Self”. And in doing so, one makes one’s larger sense of Self visible to the world and thus it is no longer invisible, buried, and perhaps even marginalized within oneself. This effectively embodies vertical development within the second half of one’s life as a process of removing layers as “masks” that hide one’s True Self.

Hello.
Welcome to the human race.
We are playing a game.
And we are playing by the following rules.
We want to tell you what the rules are
so that you know your way around.
And when you’ve understood what rules we’re playing by
when you get older,
you may be able to invent better ones.

Alan Watts

Ultimately, this book is about understanding the role of play and using it to find and express our own core truths. It is about learning to harness a force that has been built into us through millions of years of evolution, a force that allows us to both discover our most essential selves and enlarge our world. We are designed to find fulfillment and creative growth through play.

Stuart Brown, Play

Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing from the earth forever.

Yeah. Imagine that.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

Creating a Quest(ion) Log

Actually one additional thing that jumps to mind when reflecting upon Sri’s question is how its larger scope mirrors a larger question I had a couple of decades back on transforming the conventional concept of work (and perhaps how I should be creating a section on my site to list these larger questions as a whole as well).

My response to this question was as follows. Basically creating a statement that was a collection of values.

And here is a translation of it applied to myself as a person.

Embodying Values

What’s interesting about this statement is that it’s easy to say. Embodying its values is another story altogether though.

And I think this ties into creating a safe space and playful environment for people to express their larger, invisible selves within, thus making them visible.

Everyone participating within this space, not just the host of this community space, needs to truly embody what they say and believe for this space to truly become a reality for all involved within it.

Anxiety and Depression Linked to Persistent Low Self-Belief – Neuroscience News

New research reveals that individuals with anxiety and depression tend to focus more on their moments of low confidence rather than successes, fueling persistent low self-belief.

https://neurosciencenews.com/anxiety-depression-self-belief-28776/

New research reveals that individuals with anxiety and depression tend to focus more on their moments of low confidence rather than successes, fueling persistent low self-belief. Despite performing just as well as others and responding positively to feedback, these individuals build an overly negative self-image by discounting their confident performances.

I’ve experienced this same thing myself.

And I think the number one way to overcome this negative self-image is to continually reflect back upon one’s life and to become aware of and reacquainted with one’s successes that one often has forgotten about.

Overall, our findings offer a simple yet powerful message – that the persistent negative self-beliefs experienced by people with anxiety and depression are often illusory, and may be rooted in a dysfunctional view of how they evaluate themselves .

Dr Sucharit Katyal

But just to clarify. Just because something is illusory, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel real.

AI Education Won’t Future-Proof The American Workforce. Here’s Why

AI education is the right answer to the wrong question. To navigate an uncertain future, Americans need foreign language skills, not faster language models.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/pialauritzen/2025/04/27/ai-education-wont-future-proof-the-american-workforce-heres-why/

But the question shouldn’t be ‘How do we make AI part of every child’s upbringing?’ Rather, political and corporate leaders should ask themselves, ‘How do we cultivate the skills everyone needs to navigate an uncertain future with rapid changes in technology, geopolitics, health, climate, etc.?’ Being able to adapt to change, focus on what’s relevant, switch between tasks, manage conflict, and recognize systems that may be different are all important aspects of the answer to this question.

You cultivate them collectively with vertical development.

This is also similar to what I’ve said before in the past.

The future of work isn’t about learning to code. It’s about learning to recode yourself.