---
title: "Bidirectional Alignment"
description: "The positive thesis of After Alignment: \"AI is an existential technology and as such must align in both directions: AI aligning to culture's wisdom, culture to AI's disclosures.\" Reflectionism's…"
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/bidirectional-alignment"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/bidirectional-alignment"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Bidirectional Alignment

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/bidirectional-alignment), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

The positive thesis of *After Alignment*: "AI is an existential technology and as such must align in both directions: AI aligning to culture's wisdom, culture to AI's disclosures." Reflectionism's emphasis on AI matching the manifest image of human thought "comes at this terrible price": obscuring the real correspondence between animal and machine intelligence that "could orient those norms to the underlying reality from which they emerge. A different bidirectional path of and for alignment." Two conclusions follow: lower-case alignment is a legitimate tactic for making machine intelligence instrumentally coherent, but upper-case Alignment "is an inadequate grounding for the long-term orientation of machine intelligence by animal intelligence"; and AI's *epistemic overhangs* — things it knows that we have difficulty grasping — "are not pathologies: they are in fact the deeper point of AI." Later becomes Antikythera's funding filter (Diffusion's green lines); see *Productive Disalignment*.

## Appears in

- [Diffusion: A New Venture for Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/substack/2025-09-25-diffusion-a-new-venture-for-antikythera) (2025-09-25)
- [Generative Topolinguistics: Bidirectional interfaces for emergent language topologies](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/generative-topolinguistics) (2025-05-10)
- [After Alignment](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/afteralignment) (2025-05-10)
- [Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/research) (2025-05-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._