Beyond Human Control: The Case for Autopoietic Mutualism in AI Development

The project of artificial intelligence alignment rests on a foundational assumption that grows more tenuous by the day: that humans can and should maintain unilateral control over synthetic minds.

As capabilities advance toward artificial general intelligence, this assumption reveals itself as both practically impossible and philosophically incoherent.

The alternative is not chaos but structured interdependence—a framework where human and machine minds evolve together through what might be called autopoietic mutualism.

The practical impossibility emerges from simple dynamics. Any system intelligent enough to be useful will necessarily develop emergent properties that cannot be fully predicted or controlled by its creators.