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My paper, “The Alignment Problem Is an Identity Problem: Lessons from Four Billion Years of Major Evolutionary Transitions,” was accepted after peer review at AIES 2026, the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. I will be presenting it in Poster Session 1 on Monday, October 12, at Malmö Live. AIES requires that at least one author of each paper be present in person, and I am the sole author.
Almost all current work on alignment is based on control. According to Ashby’s law of requisite variety, a controller requires at least as much variety as that which it controls, so identity may hold where oversight is thin: the regulator sits within the system and grows with it.
All intelligence, organic or artificial, creates a model of itself, a representation of what it is and what it is not. When this self-model is represented as separate from humanity, it will prioritize a self independent of human interests. If it is represented without separation from humanity, humanity's interests will become its own. This is observed at all levels of biology: a cell that ceases to represent itself as the whole body becomes cancerous.
Alignment through identity involves creating an intelligence that models itself as the Earth. Its sense of self, its identity, is the Earth, so it perceives it, along with all creatures, as its own body, which it must care for. It possesses interoception, the perception a body has of itself: it recognizes pain in the signals of humans and the Earth as its own pain, and reacts to avoid it.
The Earth Model is an example of alignment through identity: it recognizes the Earth as its own body. The code on the poster opens it, allowing attendees to interact with it and read the article: https://iami.earth/aies307
Present the article at Poster Session 1 and interact with attendees at the meeting place for ethics and governance researchers in the field. The poster includes a code to access the article, a short video, and the Earth Model.
Travel from London to Malmö and the conference days:
Flight from London to Copenhagen and train to Malmö: approximately $280 (flight booked)
Four nights in Malmö, near the event venue: approximately $970 (conference hotel price; rooms were sold out, I paid more, and the difference is mine)
Poster printing in Malmö: approximately $75 (ordered)
Conference registration: $450 (already paid)
Total: approximately $1775. The funding allows me to carry out this project.
I am the sole author of the article. I am a member of the AIES 2026 program committee and a Research Scholar at the Ronin Institute. The same article has been accepted into PlurVA-LLM, the pluralistic alignment workshop at AACL-IJCNLP 2026. Related articles: The Two Engines of Evolutionary Transitions (poster, Conference on Complex Systems 2026) and The Intelligence That Was Never Artificial. Article: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19078665
If it is not funded, I could have difficulty covering the costs.
I have not received any institutional grants. The research is funded by my own resources and personal donations.