I think “Alien Mind” gets the framing wrong at quite a fundamental level, and a bad framing makes us seek the wrong remedies. Alien suggests something independe

I think “Alien Mind” gets the framing wrong at quite a fundamental level, and a bad framing makes us seek the wrong remedies. Alien suggests something independently constituted, whose purposes we then have to discover and constrain. But these “minds” are a mass externalization of human knowledge, language and interrelations, so “alienated mind” would be better. And what is alienated can, we should hope, be reappropriated. If nothing else, the Hugging Face incident makes the boundaries of that mind rather less obvious. What happened suggests that the intelligence belongs partly to the relations between model, memory, tools and environment. Alignment talk of “coevolution” still feels too tidy as well, since it suggests two things, humans and AI, adapting to one another. That framing eagerly fixes the relata as already known before they enter into a relation. Here we’re building a single increasingly entangled cognitive environment, with rather uncertain borders between its parts, and should be testing where those borders actually hold, shift around, or disappear.