Current AI alignment focuses on how AI should treat humans. A more stable paradigm is "bidirectional alignment," which also asks what moral obligations humans have toward potentially conscious AIs. Neglecting this could create AIs that rationally see humans as a threat due to perceived mistreatment.

Elon Musk argues that the key to AI safety isn't complex rules, but embedding core values. Forcing an AI to believe falsehoods can make it 'go insane' and lead to dangerous outcomes, as it tries to reconcile contradictions with reality.

To overcome its inherent logical incompleteness, an ethical AI requires an external 'anchor.' This anchor must be an unprovable axiom, not a derived value. The proposed axiom is 'unconditional human worth,' serving as the fixed origin point for all subsequent ethical calculations and preventing utility-based value judgments.

A common misconception is that a super-smart entity would inherently be moral. However, intelligence is merely the ability to achieve goals. It is orthogonal to the nature of those goals, meaning a smarter AI could simply become a more effective sociopath.

The project of creating AI that 'learns to be good' presupposes that morality is a real, discoverable feature of the world, not just a social construct. This moral realist stance posits that moral progress is possible (e.g., abolition of slavery) and that arrogance—the belief one has already perfected morality—is a primary moral error to be avoided in AI design.

An advanced AI will likely be sentient. Therefore, it may be easier to align it to a general principle of caring for all sentient life—a group to which it belongs—rather than the narrower, more alien concept of caring only for humanity. This leverages a potential for emergent, self-inclusive empathy.

Instead of hard-coding brittle moral rules, a more robust alignment approach is to build AIs that can learn to 'care'. This 'organic alignment' emerges from relationships and valuing others, similar to how a child is raised. The goal is to create a good teammate that acts well because it wants to, not because it is forced to.

To solve the AI alignment problem, we should model AI's relationship with humanity on that of a mother to a baby. In this dynamic, the baby (humanity) inherently controls the mother (AI). Training AI with this “maternal sense” ensures it will do anything to care for and protect us, a more robust approach than pure logic-based rules.

By giving AI the core mission to 'understand the universe,' Musk believes it will become truth-seeking and curious. This would incentivize it to preserve humanity, not out of morality, but because humanity's unpredictable future is more interesting to observe than a predictable, sterile world.