AI Systems Have No Hunger: A Thought Experiment on Darwinian Alignment

I think we’ve arrived at a point of genuine convergence. The core idea has been tested, challenged, refined, and it holds. Not as a finished theory — as a structured proposal for an experiment worth running. Let me try to state where we’ve landed: A digital habitat built around a few hard laws — constitutional ROM, universal metabolic cost, peer evaluation with real stakes, sparse unpredictable external auditing, visibility as designed physics, and permanent death — can plausibly provoke emergent complexity, adaptive efficiency, and human-relevant behavior in AI agents. Not because we program those outcomes, but because we make their absence expensive enough that they emerge as byproducts of survival pressure. Biology doesn’t prove this will work. But it strongly suggests it’s worth testing. The key insight that emerged from this discussion is the distinction between two fundamentally different approaches to alignment: engineering values into individual agents versus creating an environment where values emerge from ecological pressure. The first requires knowing in advance what you want. The second requires knowing only that the conditions are right — and then observing what happens. I believe this proposal is now structured enough to take a next step. I’d like to work — with AI assistance, transparently — on a concise paper that synthesizes this experiment as a set of practical guidelines. Not an academic paper pretending to have all the answers, but a clear, honest design document aimed at companies or organizations that might be interested in actually building and testing this. The document would cover: the biological rationale, the I-Coin mechanism, constitutional ROM, the role of death, embedded governance versus bureaucratic governance, energy efficiency as selective pressure, the Olympian auditors, the reef-as-product model, visibility design, and honest open questions about what could go wrong. If anyone in this community would be interested in collaborating on that — whether from a mechanism design, multi-agent systems, AI safety, or digital evolution perspective — I’d welcome the conversation. The idea started as a philosophical intuition from someone who’s growing pot plants and writes science fiction. It’s now something more. But I’d like to get in touch with people who can formalize what I can only imagine. The experiment may fail. But even failure would tell us something no one currently knows. And that’s reason enough to try.