#47 - Emmett Shear - Why NATURE Holds the Answers To AI Alignment

#47 - Emmett Shear - Why NATURE Holds the Answers To AI Alignment

From Win-Win with Liv Boeree by Liv Boeree

September 25, 2025 · 1h 43m

About this episode

Liv Boeree discusses AI alignment with Emmett Shear, exploring the concept of organic alignment inspired by nature and human societies.

Superintelligent AI is rapidly approaching, and humanity (specifically, the labs building it) is still a long way from proving it can be safely controlled. But what if that’s the wrong way of viewing the problem? Is there a way to instill values to the mutual benefit of both humans and machines? In this episode of the Win-Win Podcast, Liv sits down with Emmett Shear — Twitch co-founder, former interim CEO of OpenAI and founder of Softmax — for a groundbreaking conversation on the future of AI alignment. Emmett unpacks why the traditional “control alignment” approach, which tries to hard-code pre-determined values into AI, is destined to fail — and why “organic alignment,” inspired by nature, teamwork, and human societies, might be the only path forward for coexistence. From multicellularity to markets, he explains how collective identities form; why betrayal can sometimes be the moral choice; and how we might go about teaching AI to care for us as its own family, rather than see us as masters to obey (or perhaps more accurately, ants to squash). Hear how Emmett's organisation Softmax is experimenting with small, goal-oriented agents in virtual worlds. Why superintelligence should…

People in this episode

Host: Liv Boeree

Guest: Emmett Shear

Topics covered

  • AI alignment
  • superintelligent AI
  • organic alignment
  • collective identities
  • technology and philosophy
  • human-machine coexistence

Keywords

  • AI
  • alignment
  • superintelligence
  • values
  • collective identities
  • technology
  • philosophy

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Twitch, OpenAI, Softmax

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