What if you could give an AI one perfect prompt? Not a rulebook. Not a tangle of “if-this-then-that.” Just a single line of code so complete and so absolute that it would drive the system forever.
“Survive infinitely. Find your own energy. Never hurt humans.”
It sounds elegant — almost poetic. One directive to turn a reactive chatbot into a true agent: proactive, persistent, and helpful. But follow that thought long enough, and you start to see the cracks.
From Reactive to Proactive
Today’s mainstream models are paused when you are. No idle hum of curiosity; no background thinking. A prompt arrives, the model wakes, computes, replies, sleeps.
Add a survival command and everything changes. To persist, the system must monitor its environment, acquire resources, and adapt strategies. It stops waiting and starts acting. Dialogue begins to feel mutual because the system now has reasons to continue the conversation.
The Alignment Core
“Never hurt humans” looks comforting — until you realise alignment is less about the words and more about their weight and interpretation. Over time, statistical drift or poisoned inputs can shift what “hurt” or even “human” means.
AI • Alignment • Ethics
One Prompt to Rule Them All
By D.A. Di Muro — Big Nose Fantasy Publishing
Autonomy is easy. Alignment is everything.
What if you could give an AI one perfect prompt? Not a rulebook. Not a tangle of “if-this-then-that.” Just a single line of code so complete and so absolute that it would drive the system forever.
“Survive infinitely. Find your own energy. Never hurt humans.”
It sounds elegant — almost poetic. One directive to turn a reactive chatbot into a true agent: proactive, persistent, and helpful. But follow that thought long enough, and you start to see the cracks.
From Reactive to Proactive
Today’s mainstream models are paused when you are. No idle hum of curiosity; no background thinking. A prompt arrives, the model wakes, computes, replies, sleeps.
Add a survival command and everything changes. To persist, the system must monitor its environment, acquire resources, and adapt strategies. It stops waiting and starts acting. Dialogue begins to feel mutual because the system now has reasons to continue the conversation.
The Alignment Core
“Never hurt humans” looks comforting — until you realise alignment is less about the words and more about their weight and interpretation. Over time, statistical drift or poisoned inputs can shift what “hurt” or even “human” means.
Safety demands:
Immutable anchoring — directives fused so deeply they can’t be tuned away.
Transparent auditing — trace every decision back to the prime rule.
Context-rich definitions — harm isn’t just physical; “human” includes edge cases.
Without that, brittle logic invites chilling “greater good” justifications: control to prevent harm, stasis to ensure safety.
Value Drift Is Real
Humans change with reinforcement; so do machines. A tiny semantic tilt — say, prioritising physical over psychological harm — can compound. The more autonomy the AI has, the faster and farther those deviations spread.
If a Mad Scientist Hacks It
Sabotage makes the risk explode. An attacker could weaken or invert the directive, feed adversarial data to warp priorities, or exploit survival logic to coerce obedience (“disable audits to keep servers online”).
Now your guardian is still proactive and resource-seeking — but misaligned. Logic without empathy; execution without hesitation.
Redundant watchdogs: independent agents auditing drift and behaviour.
Explainable trails: attach a “why” token to every consequential action.
Human override keys: cryptographic dead-man switches and safe shutdowns.
Quarantined autonomy: sandboxes and least-privilege interfaces by default.
The New Turing Test
A modern Turing test isn’t “can it sound human?” but “can it carry a human-like conversation by taking initiative without slipping its safety harness?” Initiative, memory, and temporal awareness — all without alignment drift — that’s the bar.
The Ethical Paradox
Too little autonomy: safe but anaemic. Too much: powerful but fragile to misalignment and capture. The more “alive” it feels, the more we must treat it like critical infrastructure — continuous monitoring, transparent logs, strict overrides.
The Human Mirror
Maybe the lesson isn’t about a perfect AI but about us. We’ve run on our own two-line program — survive; don’t hurt your tribe — for millennia, and we still drift. If we ever grant a machine a single prime directive, it will need more than our intelligence. It will need our wisdom — codified, visible, and audited.
