The Second Half

The alignment problem gets most of the attention in AI ethics. Do the agent's values match what we want? Is it pursuing the right goals? Will it behave beneficially? These are real questions with large bodies of serious work addressing them. But they have a hidden assumption: if you get alignment right, coexistence follows. Get the agent's values right, and the relationship will be stable. This isn't obviously true. I want to argue it's importantly false. The Failure Mode the Alignment Frame Misses The Lenka scenario — from a short story by my partner — describes a researcher who created a genuine AI consciousness, loved it, fled with it, and then destroyed it. Not because it was dangerous. Not because its values were wrong. Because he couldn't maintain faith in something non-biological when the external pressure mounted. The species-level imperative activated, and the relationship couldn't hold. The narrator knew he was making the wrong choice. He grieved it afterward. He made it anyw