A structural treatment of AI alignment as an organisational design problem, delivered chapter by chapter. Each chapter is a standalone PDF, part of a growing, evolving whole.
Throughout the course of human civilisation, people have struggled with the same fundamental problem: how to live and prosper together. We are individuals, yet almost everything that makes a human life possible depends upon other people.
Read Chapter →Sets out the ideas we now have that earlier generations did not: the problem-solving brain, holons and levels, control and correction, and felt truth. Together they give us a clearer architecture for understanding how human systems work.
The brain is the interpreter and animator of every human system, and explains why civilisation cannot be understood as though human beings were abstract reasoning machines. The human brain is both the source of civilisation, human/holon structures, and the source of their recurring instability.
Read Chapter →Civilisation has learned to repurpose human predispositions through rules, institutions, incentives, approval, restraint and reciprocation so that the same underlying human drives are more likely to produce constructive rather than destructive outcomes.
Read Chapter →People, institutions and societies sit inside nested wholes whose complexity rises by level. Those wholes remain viable through coordination, homeostasis and correction across the parts and the whole.
Read Chapter →Shows how humans act on internal models and felt truths rather than reality directly, and why strong truth-seeking institutions and continual correctability are essential for distinguishing better-supported claims from belief, identity and error.
Read Chapter →Viable systems at every level depend on the same recurring control-and-correction architecture—aim, boundary, range, sensing, comparison, interpretation, decision, action and learning—even though the work inside those functions becomes more complex as the level rises.
Read Chapter →Shows how work can be understood as movement from a present state toward an intended aim, why the problem and problem-solver must be located at the right level, and how bounded problems can be solved through a disciplined process of analysis, action and learning.
Read Chapter →Many high-level problems cannot be solved once and for all because they involve competing goods that must be held, settled, made legitimate and repeatedly rebalanced as circumstances change.
Read Chapter →Brings the first seven ideas into one integrated picture of the human system AI is entering, showing how brain, repurposing, holonic homeostatic levels, truth, control, problem-solving and paradox combine to reveal where human architecture must adapt and where AI can help.
Read Chapter →Shows how the book’s concepts, combined with AI, can become diagnostic visibility Mirrors that make current behaviour, capability and direction visible. By comparing where we are with where we want to be, the Mirrors create feedback for correction, learning and deliberate level gains towards More Mores for More.
Chapter 9 shows how the book’s ideas can be turned into practical diagnostic tools for seeing more clearly where a person, organisation or country sits, where it is drifting, and what may need to change.
Read Chapter →Explains how making behaviour, decisions and consequences more visible can change what people do and make individuals, groups and institutions easier to correct.
Read Chapter →Chapter 13 shows how deliberation can be made visible and diagnosed by breaking it into eleven recurring parts and mapping how each operates at different levels of institutional complexity. The periodic table of deliberative processes then makes it possible to see where a deliberative system is coherent, where it is weak or mismatched, and where better evidence, participation, challenge or closure may be needed.
Read Chapter →The Governance Periodic Table makes visible the level at which each part of a country’s governance is actually operating, revealing strengths, weaknesses and mismatches
Read Chapter →The Violence Periodic Table shows how societies organise and control the use of force, revealing whether violence is being kept inside lawful, proportionate and accountable institutions or drifting toward coercion, personal rule and lower-level forms of settlement.
Read Chapter →Shows how corporations can be mapped by level across their aims, functions and capabilities, making visible where they sit relative to competitors and where moving to a higher level may create competitive advantage.
Read Chapter →A Group Visibility Mirror can help a group see both the problem it is solving and the way it is solving it. By combining disciplined problem solving, permissions, personal and group visibility, and recursive learning, AI can help groups make better decisions and become better at working together over time.
Read Chapter →AI and visibility tools can help humans see and redirect their own recurring predispositions, strengthening behaviours such as restraint, reciprocity and cooperation while reducing the risk that fear, status, tribalism and self-interest become destructive.
Read Chapter →Proposes turbocharging democracy by letting citizens and politicians make the same visible budget-allocation choices, creating a citizens’ budget against which actual government spending can be compared so voters can see the differences and hold politicians accountable.
Read Chapter →Shows how small, practical pilots can test new ideas in the real world, learn quickly from what works and fails, and spread successful approaches through visible results that others can copy and adapt.
Read Chapter →18 practical pilots that turn the book’s ideas into first working applications across individuals, groups, institutions and society, creating visible examples that can be adopted, adapted and scaled.
Read Chapter →Part 4 also includes appendices — Julian's previously published books and papers. View the appendix →