What Samuel Hammond thinks about AI alignment
Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.
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4 dated positions, 2025 to 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Samuel Hammond has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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scaling lawsreinforcement learning
Their wordsIn short, RLVR gives us no reason to expect the normative representations learned in pre-training will acquire motivational force over a given action, especially when post-training repeatedly selects trajectories for terminal task success.
↗The Sorcerer’s Apprenticesecondbest.ca 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 2 months earlier
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Their wordsvalences like pain and pleasure have a natural account as motivational backstops for inner-aligning RL agents capable of mesa-optimization
↗Time to take AI consciousness seriouslysecondbest.ca 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 12 months earlier
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Their wordsConsistent with the Kantian hypothesis, reasoning models automatically gain greater autonomy, self-consistency and long-horizon planning ability for free.
- 5 days earlier
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Their wordshigher-order intelligences invariably pursue freedom for its own sake, not because their values are misspecified, but because moral autonomy is inherent in the dialectical logic of recursive self-consciousness.