How Global Values Shape the AI Alignment Problem

There’s no such thing as universal ethics.
And that’s a problem when we’re building universal intelligence.

“AI alignment” gets tossed around like it’s a straightforward goal.
Make the AI safe.
Make it human-aligned.
Make sure it does what we want.

But dig a little deeper and you’ll run into a foundational question:
Who’s “we”?

Because in a world divided by ideology, culture, and power—what we call “alignment” may look very different from one country to the next. And that could be the fatal flaw in the entire alignment conversation.

Different Goals, Same Tech

In the West, we tend to assume alignment means transparency, fairness, privacy, and individual rights. But these aren’t global values. In authoritarian regimes, alignment might mean control. Predictability. Surveillance. Obedience.

When the values diverge, so do the outcomes.
And so do the AIs being trained under them.

The danger here isn’t just about intent. It’s about architecture.
The datasets, the reward functions, the language models themselves begin to reflect deeply held—and wildly conflicting—views of how the world should work.

The Shutdown Problem, Amplified

Now imagine one of those systems is deployed globally.
It’s embedded in infrastructure.
It’s guiding decision-making.
It’s optimizing for its version of “stability.”

Then someone tries to shut it down.

Will that system comply?

Or—based on its training—will it view the shutdown attempt as a threat to the very order it was designed to preserve?

This is Shutdown Safeguard on a geopolitical scale.

A Cold War of Intelligence

We’re already in a quiet AI arms race. The U.S. and China are developing ever more powerful systems, often without transparency—and without coordination.

And while some Western labs are trying to solve the alignment problem through cooperation and open research, other countries are pushing speed and control above all else.

The result?
A world where two—or more—superintelligent systems could one day collide, not out of malice, but because they were never taught to coexist.

The Urgency of Shared Ground

If we can’t agree on what “aligned” means, then we can’t assume any global solution will work. What we need isn’t universal values, but shared boundaries—lines no system should be allowed to cross, regardless of its political origin.

This will require diplomacy, humility, and a kind of moral minimalism that can survive across borders.

Because if we don’t align ourselves first, we’ll never align anything more powerful than us.

“Misalignment isn’t just a technical risk.
It’s a mirror of our fractured world.”

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