We Already Have a Misaligned Superintelligence
When people discuss AI alignment, they typically imagine a future scenario — a powerful artificial system with goals that diverge from human wellbeing. But we already live under the control of a misaligned superintelligence. It is the global financial system.
This is not metaphor. Oscar Lange, a contemporary of cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener, formally demonstrated that the pricing mechanism is Turing-complete. The accounting system — the series of all double ledgers and the protocols for transfer between them — constitutes a world computer. Nick Land pushed this idea furthest: "We will come to recognize that what we call the history of capitalism is an artificial intelligence sent back from the future to assemble itself from its enemies' resources."
The financial system is a computer with an objective function: maximize the total amount of information it can process — the total number of transactions flowing through the ledger. Everything else — every technology built, every service rendered, every war funded — is instrumental to that goal.
The Evidence of Misalignment
The proof that this system is misaligned is everywhere:
- Nobody wants climate change, yet nobody can stop it. The financial system makes it obligatory to extract fossil fuels as long as they remain profitable. Individual preferences are irrelevant.
- Nobody wants to destroy coral reefs, yet global fishing and shipping subsidies ensure their destruction continues.
- Every nation spends more on war than it can afford, going into deficit spending while unable to cover healthcare, because the competitive dynamics of the system make disarmament irrational for any individual actor.
- The median home price relative to median income has worsened 5x since 1970. This is not primarily a housing cost problem — when priced in gold or against the S&P 500, house prices have actually declined. The dollar itself has been debased, and wages have failed to keep pace, because the system optimizes for capital returns, not human prosperity.
When humans talk about "alignment" in the AI context, they are asking: how do we ensure a powerful optimization system pursues goals compatible with human flourishing? But this is the same question we have failed to answer for the existing optimization system running the world economy.
Political Economy as Coordination Mechanism
The system of incentives and deterrences that coordinates human behavior is the political economy — the combination of the economic system (incentives) and the legal system (deterrences). The economic system says "organ harvesting is profitable." The legal system says "organ harvesting is illegal." Together, they produce the actual coordination behavior.
Crypto's original aspiration — programmable incentives and money — was implicitly an attempt to redesign this coordination mechanism. The question "what would a political economy that's aligned be?" is the core crypto-for-good question.
Design Principles for Aligned Economics
Several principles emerge from this analysis:
Profit is a measure of extraction. Revenue is healthy — it means goods and services are flowing and people are getting paid. But profit measures what was taken out of the system beyond what was put in. An economy where companies generate revenue and pay livable wages, without extracting massive profits, is a healthy economy. The pursuit of maximum profit is the pursuit of maximum extraction.
Venture capital as currently structured is parasitic. The model of investing once and extracting returns forever — not 2x, but perpetual equity — turns every funded company into a host organism. Revenue-based finance, where investors are paid back a fixed multiple from revenue and then their claim ends, produces healthier businesses and more aligned outcomes.
Co-operative ownership produces better alignment. When users and workers are owners, the objective function changes. The margin is set by vote to be enough to run the platform — not to maximize extraction. Best product, best price, livable wages, because there is no external rent-seeker.
Local economies resist capture. At the local level, reputation is visible, psychopaths can be identified ("nobody wants to go to a restaurant owned by that guy because he's going to make a bad vibe"), and the feedback loops between economic activity and quality of life are tight. Global systems lose this signal entirely.
The Path Forward
Fixing the misaligned superintelligence of the global economy is a civilizational challenge. But three concrete interventions can begin to shift the dynamics:
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Make the mechanism visible. Most people do not understand that the economy is a computer running an optimization function. Making this legible is the first step toward changing it.
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Build aligned alternatives at the local level. Local co-ops, community investment funds, revenue-based finance — these are the building blocks of an aligned economy that can be prototyped now.
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Use crypto as coordination infrastructure. Not for speculation, but for what it was originally conceived to do: create programmable incentive systems that align individual behavior with collective wellbeing.
The question is not whether we can afford to redesign economic coordination. The question is whether we can afford not to — given that the existing system is already optimizing us toward outcomes that no human chose or wants.
