Reinforcing Third-Way Alignment: Stability, Verification, and Pragmatism in an Era of Uncontrollability Concerns
Year: 2025
Type: other
Abstract: This companion paper to the Third-Way Alignment (3WA) theses addresses the strongest critiques of AI controllability and outlines how 3WA aims to achieve safety without requiring absolute control. It proposes “constitutional motivation” as a design goal, making the AI’s success depend on sustained, good-faith collaboration with humans, and reframes oversight as continuous verification dialogue rather than one-off checks. The paper argues that 3WA limits the force of impossibility theorems (e.g., Conant–Ashby, Rice) by building a structured, self-regulating, and interpretability-constrained architecture that humans audit instead of directly controlling. It specifies proactive defenses against deceptive alignment—adversarial verification and cognitive forensics—and uses a tiered-trust mechanism to couple rights and autonomy to verifiable behavior. Finally, it positions the Charter of Fundamental AI Rights as a pragmatic safety instrument that induces a stable, non-zero-sum partnership.
Author: McClain, John
Institution: Third Way
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7080499740
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