Published on June 22, 2025 3:32 PM GMT
We say alignment is about control, safety, precision. But after a decade working as a matchmaker in India’s increasingly chaotic relationship market, I’ve learnt that what sustains a system isn’t control, it’s trust. And trust doesn’t live in rules. It lives in memory, repair, and mutual adaptation.
I’ve spent years watching relationships fall apart not because people weren’t compatible, but because they didn’t know how to collaborate. We are fluent in chemistry, but clumsy with clarity. We optimised for trait, not values or processes. And when conflicts hit, as it always does, we have no shared playbook to return to.
In traditional Indian matchmaking, we had a whole socio-structural scaffolding propping up long-term collaboration through race or caste endogamy, community expectations, family intermediation, shared rituals and rites. It was crude and often unjust, but it was structurally coherent. Marriage was not just a bond between two people, but between two lineages, empires and philosophies of life. There were rules, expectations and fallback norms. Vows weren’t just ceremonial; they were memory devices, reminding people what they were committing to when emotions faded.
Today, most of that scaffolding is gone.
Tinder has replaced the community priest or matchmaker, and in this frictionless new marketplace, we are left to figure out long-term cooperation with short-term instincts. Even when we genuinely care for each other, we often collapse under the weight of ambiguity. We never clarify what we mean by commitment. We never learnt how to repair after rupture, and we assume love would make things obvious.
But love doesn’t make things obvious, context does, and maybe design too.
This isn’t just about marriage, it’s about systems and it’s about alignment.
Much of the current conversation on AI alignment focuses on architecture, oversight, corrigibility and formal guarantees. All of that is necessary, and I am not refuting it one bit. But I don't see AI in isolation, because we humans are building it, for us, and so, I can't help but view it from a lens of collaboration or partnership.
In human systems, I’ve rarely seen misalignment fixed by control. I’ve seen it fixed by context, memory, feedback, and repair. Not all of which can be coded cleanly into an objective function.
I’ve watched couples disintegrate not because of what happened, but because it kept happening. The breach wasn’t just an error. It was a pattern that wasn’t noticed, a pain that wasn’t remembered and a signal that wasn’t acknowledged.
Systems that don't track trust will inevitably erode it.
It’s tempting to think that AI, given enough data, will learn all this on its own. That it will intuit human needs, pick up patterns and converge on stable behaviours. But from the relational world, I’ve learnt that learning isn’t enough, structural scaffolding for sustenance matters.
Most humans don’t know how to articulate their emotional contracts, let alone renegotiate them. Many don’t even realise repair is an option. That they can say, "Hey, this mattered to me. Can you remember next time?" If we humans can’t do this instinctively, why would we expect machines to?
In nature, systems evolved slowly. Organs, species and ecosystems; they didn’t drop overnight like an update. They became resilient because they were shaped by millennia of co-adaptation. They learnt, painfully, that survival isn’t about short-term optimisation. It’s about coherence over time. It’s about knowing when not to dominate, and about restraint.
We humans can, if we choose, eliminate entire species. But most of us don’t. Somewhere in our messy cultural evolution, we’ve internalised a sense that ... might isn’t always right. Survival is entangled, and so, power must be held in context.
AI doesn’t have that inheritance. It is young, fast and brittle (if not reckless), and it is being inserted into mature social ecosystems without the long runway of evolutionary friction. It’s not wrong to build it, but it is wrong to assume it will learn the right instincts just because it sees enough examples.
That’s why I think we need to take on the role not of controllers, but of stewards, or parents, even. Not to infantilise the system, but to give it what it currently lacks i.e. relational memory, calibrated responsiveness and the capacity to recover after breach.
Eventually, maybe it will become anti-fragile enough to do this on its own. But not yet. Until then, we design, and we nurture.
We design for value memory, not just functional memory, but the ability to track what a human has signalled as emotionally or ethically significant. We design for trust tracking, not just "was the task completed?" but "has the system earned reliability in the eyes of this user?" We design for repair affordances i.e. the moment when something goes wrong and the system says, "That mattered. Let me try again." We design for relational onboarding or lightweight ways to understand a user’s tone, sensitivity, and boundary preferences.
These are not soft features. They are structural affordances for relational alignment. Just like rituals and vows aren’t romantic fluff, but memory scaffolds. Just like marriage is not only about love, but about co-navigation under stress.
Some might say this isn’t necessary. That good architecture, regulation, and interpretability will cover the gaps. But every safety approach needs a medium, and in complex socio-technical systems, that medium is trust. Not blind trust, but earned, trackable, recoverable trust.
Relational alignment won’t replace other paradigms. But it may be the piece that makes them stick like a substrate that holds the rest together when things begin to drift. Because if we don’t design our systems to repair trust, hold memory, and attune to difference, we won’t just build misaligned machines, we’ll build lonely ones.
And no, I am not anthropomorphising AI or worry about its welfare, but I know that loneliness puts us at odds with rest of the world, making it harder to distinguish right from wrong.
I use the parenting analogy not to suggest we’ll control AI forever, but to point out that even with children, foundational values are just the start. Beyond a point, it is each interaction, with peers, strangers, systems, that shapes who they become. Centralised control only goes so far. What endures is the relational context. And that, perhaps, is where real alignment begins.
Discuss
