Beyond the AI Regulation Debate: The Revolutionary 'Intimate AI' Solution

"We're already highly asymmetric in our relationship between our competency and capacity as humans with the things that are going on in the digital space—and that gap is just getting bigger," warns technology entrepreneur and philosopher Jordan Hall, outlining a radical third path for AI development beyond the current binary debate of regulation versus unrestricted advancement.

The Sunday Labs advisor's proposal for "intimate AI" represents a fundamental reconceptualization of artificial intelligence that could address the alignment problem at its core, writes End of Miles.

The Alignment Dilemma

Hall's proposal emerges from what he describes as a failure of traditional approaches to AI safety. Rather than choosing between futile regulation that arrives "way too late and behind the times" or the equally problematic approach of assuming we can simply "program it so that it doesn't ever turn against us," Hall envisions a fundamentally different paradigm.

"The idea is that the concept of alignment was improperly presented," Hall explains. "One can only have alignment with something that has a set of basic characteristics. The way I described it was you can only be aligned with something that has a soul, or you can only be aligned with something that has an identity." Jordan Hall

The technology advisor argues that the current approach to AI alignment mistakenly assumes we can align artificial intelligence with "humanity" as a category, when humanity itself lacks a coherent set of values. Instead, he proposes that alignment must begin at the individual level.

What Makes Intimate AI Different

Unlike today's centralized AI systems, intimate AI would attune itself to an individual's biometrics, social metrics, psychometrics, and behavioral patterns, creating a personalized relationship with its user. This approach would distribute AI into individualized instances rather than monolithic systems.

"By hypothesis, an intimate AI that has access to the unique training data of a given individual's intimate reality would be able to achieve something like symmetry in fact—perhaps an asymmetry on our behalf—vis-à-vis the infosphere." Jordan Hall

The philosopher and entrepreneur emphasizes that such systems would serve as "guardian AI," helping to protect individuals from manipulation while enhancing personal agency in an increasingly complex digital environment.

Why Traditional Solutions Fall Short

Current models of AI oversight fail to address the fundamental problem—the inherent asymmetry between humans and increasingly sophisticated technology, according to Hall. Legislation consistently trails technological advancement, while technical safeguards misunderstand the nature of emerging AI systems.

"A properly constructed intimate AI would be able to provide a framework that would have a probabilistic likelihood of providing the kind of enculturation processes needed to support human flourishing rather than diminishment". Jordan Hall

He points to the failure of current digital spaces to maintain human agency, describing them as "cultures of selling your soul" where individuals constantly trade their values against the opportunities presented to them.

Moving Beyond Theory to Implementation

Hall's proposal isn't merely theoretical. Sunday Labs is actively developing technology that implements these principles, along with a revolutionary corporate structure designed to avoid the incentive problems that plague traditional tech companies.

"The problem that we're trying to solve—this deep problem of how do we actually properly integrate the power of AI into the world in a way that is not only non-catastrophic but is in fact actually good—cannot be solved by any corporate structure, any entity that is governed by the formal constraints and the incentive landscapes of an ordinary tech startup." Jordan Hall

For Hall, the challenge of AI alignment represents not just a technical problem but a philosophical one requiring a complete rethinking of how humans relate to technology. "In this little conversation," he concludes, "we may actually be articulating at least the beginnings of what is an actual plausible design specification for what human-AI alignment looks like."