What are we building for?

The founding statement for [re:alignment] arguing that AI "alignment" is treated far too narrowly as a technical problem, while the deeper normative questions go unaddressed: what values AI should hold, who gets to decide, and whether the economic, political, and institutional structures incubating it can produce genuinely beneficial outcomes.

The essay warns that an optimization mindset mistakes instrumental goods (longer life, cured disease) for the intrinsic goods that actually make a life worth living (meaning, beauty, connection). As such, we risk building toward a future that hits every benchmark while entirely missing the point. Against both the helplessness of insiders and the temptation to withdraw, I call to broaden the conversation and redistribute the power to shape AI while insisting that art, not logical argument alone, is a necessary way to access what human flourishing actually feels like.