Skip to content

Bridge Atlas - Episode 4: Alignment | Emmett Shear & Alex Stokes

InterviewEmmett Shear, Alex Stokes
researcherpractitioner
Bridge Atlas - Episode 4: Alignment | Emmett Shear & Alex Stokes
Open resource →

Emmett Shear (founder of Softmax) argues that alignment is not a fixed state but a relative, multi-scale protocol built on shared success, specialization, and only then enforcement, and warns that a single global, fork-resistant blockchain or AI system would be dangerous because it eliminates the ability to exit or locally reinterpret rules. Alex Stokes (Ethereum Foundation) counters that Ethereum's decentralization and permissionlessness push power to the edges, using rollups and the ability to fork as mechanisms to avoid Shear's feared 'ossified' lock-in, while the two debate whether Ethereum or any man-made protocol can sustain genuine, evolving alignment the way Shear argues organic systems do via Karl Friston's free energy principle.

Topics

alignment-as-protocol-shared-success-specialization-enforcementbridge-atlasforking-and-exit-rightsgovernancemarkov-blankets-free-energy-principleprotocol-ossificationprotocolsrollup-based-decentralizationtechnology

Related resources

Interview

Bridge Atlas - Episode 5: Verifiability | Shreya Shankar & Justin Drake

Shreya Shankar (Berkeley PhD, creator of the DocETL declarative data-processing system) and Justin Drake (Ethereum Foundation, lean Ethereum project) compare verifiability across AI data pipelines and blockchain consensus. Drake explains SNARKs, trust-minimization, and recursive proof composition for Ethereum's deterministic and non-deterministic components, while Shankar details how DocETL handles LLM-powered query pipelines, human-AI misalignment, and eval design for unstructured data like court transcripts, with both drawing parallels between 'hints' in SNARK proving and decomposition techniques for AI reasoning verification.

Shreya Shankar, Justin Drake

Interview

Bridge Atlas - Episode 2: Paradigms | Nils Gilman and Josh Stark

Nils Gilman (Berggruen Institute) and Josh Stark (Ethereum Foundation) discuss two concepts they each coined: 'planetary thinking' (governance of non-human-directed flows like carbon, whales, and space debris) and 'hardness' (a system's capacity to make future outcomes reliably true, distinct from subjective trust or reliance). They explore how hardness explains Ethereum's appeal amid declining institutional trust, distinguish hardness from trust using examples like universities versus Harvard's reputation, and discuss Ethereum's potential role in planetary-scale coordination through projects like Rarimo's Freedom Tool and Bhutan's national ID system.

Nils Gilman, Josh Stark

Talk

Open Social Protocols: A Commons-Based Protocol Layer

Jose Leal (with Scott Clearwater) presents Open Social Protocols, a framework built on Needs (recurring coordination conditions) around which communities publish, fork, and adopt Protocols rather than collapsing into single fixed agreements. He describes 'bridging protocols' that let multiple competing protocols for the same need coexist and interoperate, built atop the AT Protocol and a 'Common Ground' layer, citing examples like Morning Star Farms and Buurtzorg as organizations already operating this way without naming it 'protocol'.

Jose Leal, Scott Clearwater