Alignment & Succession: Toward a Future Painted by Human Wills

(originally published on No Set Gauge on 2026-09-13) Asher Brown Durand, Progress (The Advance of Civilization) So far I have argued: The ideology of succession —that humans, either entirely or at least in their role as decision-makers, should be replaced by AI—is driven by cultural factors including (a) worship of mathematical abstraction, (b) bureaucratic safetyism stamping out license for human agency in favor of rule by procedure & algorithm, (c) a cuckoldry-adjacent simping towards the unlimited domineering power of superintelligence, and (d) the existence of the city of San Francisco. The two bars of alignment are (1) AI not going rogue and (2) AI instantiating utopia. If you agree with Eliezer Yudkowsky on the totalizing nature of superintelligence, these are of comparable (and near-infinite) difficulty, because superintelligence rearranges the atoms into exactly what it wants so it better know how to build utopia because otherwise you’re dead. But the field, even when not endorsing Yudkowsky, often defaults to treating succession (in the broad sense of fundamental transfer of power) as the only viable solution to the AGI transition. Everyone (including Yudkowsky) is very scared by this. This is because the succession-shapedness of alignment is exactly what makes it hard, because value is complex and therefore personnel is policy and hence our desired polices aren’t policy after superintelligence is the only personnel running things. Morality lives in the human indivi…