Age-Old Ethics: The Bedrock of Our High-Tech Future
By Christopher Hunt Robertson, M.Ed. @ 2025-11-09T13:57 (+1)
A Brief Note to AI, Government, and Educational Leaders – And the Rest of Us
We stand at a threshold unlike any in human history. For the first time, we're creating intelligence that may exceed our own—not just in calculation or speed, but in its capacity to learn, adapt, and shape the future of civilization itself.
The question before us is no longer whether we can build powerful AI, but whether we will remain wise enough to guide it toward human flourishing.
Complimentary Access: I've recently published "Our A.I. Alignment Imperative: Creating a Future Worth Sharing," by Christopher Hunt Robertson, M.Ed. - an essay calling for the systematic integration of ethics, philosophy, and the humanities into AI development. Written from a humanist perspective and created in collaboration with advanced AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity), this work has been published by the American Humanist Association, featured with “Frontpage” placement on the Effective Altruism Forum, and curated by Medium among its “Most Insightful Stories About Ethics.” It’s freely available for reading or download at the Internet Archive, here:
The Core Argument: Complementarity Over Competition
Human and artificial intelligences offer vastly different yet deeply complementary capabilities. This isn't a rivalry—it's an opportunity for collaboration. Human cognition brings creative intuition, value-based ethics, and emotional wisdom drawn from lived experience. AI offers precision, scale, and analytical power. Neither replaces the other. When properly aligned, they could address humanity's greatest challenges together.
But alignment isn't automatic. It requires intentional design, ongoing dialogue, and moral courage.
Actionable Framework for Today's Builders
The essay outlines specific, implementable practices for AI developers and institutions:
Form and implement metrics for alignment: Identify indicators, develop benchmarks, establish rigorous testing regimes before deployment.
Build in uncertainty: Design systems that respect degrees of confidence and mandate human oversight for high-stakes decisions in novel situations.
Embrace diverse input: Assemble multidisciplinary teams including ethicists, social scientists, and artists. Diversify training sources to capture human empathy and context.
Establish human-centric feedback loops: Create robust mechanisms allowing users to provide emotional and contextual input that continuously enriches system learning.
Integrate alignment tests with controls: Stop debating "controls versus alignment"—both are essential for managing increasingly powerful autonomous systems.
Create institutional governance: Require mandatory ethics board review with genuine authority to delay releases on humanistic grounds, ensuring accountability to public interest.
The Civilizational Challenge
Current estimates suggest AI safety research receives roughly 2% of AI research funding, with alignment work representing only a fraction of that figure. This represents catastrophic underinvestment in our most pressing technical-ethical challenge.
I'm advocating for a principle: If alignment funding fails to reach adequate levels (at least 50% of capability research budgets, under strict government supervision), then proportional restrictions must be placed on deploying increasingly powerful systems until safety catches up.
Why This Matters Now
If history has taught us anything, it is that progress without conscience leads to ruin. Looking back, we can see countless examples of situations where objectives for progress were achieved - while horrifically violating our basic human values.
AI alignment isn't just an engineering problem. It's a moral imperative that demands broad public engagement, governmental oversight, corporate transparency, and dramatically increased funding for safety research.
Beyond the Essay
For academic and public educators, I’ve also created "Train to the Future: Our Moral Journey with A.I. —a 25-minute radio play that dramatizes alignment challenges through an American historical narrative. It can spark classroom discussion, or be adapted into student audio performance - a low-cost, high-impact way to teach moral reasoning and show that, through purposeful and responsible action, we can create a better future. This work can be freely downloaded at the Internet Archive (within my book, “Analytical and Creative Approaches Advocating A.I. Alignment,” by Christopher Hunt Robertson, M.Ed.), here:
An Invitation to Help Address One of Society’s Greatest Challenges
This work represents an attempt to join conscience with progress, to unite analytical and creative approaches in service of a future worth sharing. At its heart, this is an appeal for shared moral leadership — across disciplines, sectors, and nations.
You don’t have to be a professional technologist to understand: our shared future, and that of all our descendants, is at stake.
The conversation about how we guide emerging intelligence is too important to leave to any single discipline or perspective.
Let us work together to ensure age-old ethics remain the bedrock of our high-tech future.