Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher
Published
The book's reading of Babel is one of its sharpest reframes. What we inherited as a story about divine punishment, Infinite Architects reads as an early diagnosis of misaligned sub-goals.
The tower of Babel wasn't destroyed by divine wrath; it collapsed under the weight of its own incoherence. Babylon, in this telling, might destroy itself too, eventually, when there's nothing left to consume.Infinite Architects, The Two Gardens
Later in the book the argument is spelled out. The tower does not fall because God is jealous. It falls because incoherence is unstable. The system grew so complex it could no longer communicate with itself. The sub-projects diverged. The goals became contradictory. The book connects this directly to the modern concern about sufficiently complex systems that optimise for contradictory sub-goals: components that are not aligned with each other will work at cross-purposes and build towers that cannot stand.
In the language the book has established by chapter three, Babel is what Babylon looks like when you draw it. Ambition without stewardship, capability without coherence, sub-agents pulling in different directions until the whole thing scatters. The point is not that ancient authors anticipated large-language-model alignment. The point is that they observed a pattern about existential transitions and encoded it in narrative form so it would survive long enough to be useful. Now it is useful.
The chapter draws a direct line from the story to a modern engineering rule: complexity without coherence is unstable. It is a structural argument for embedding values before scale, not after. If Babel warns anything, in the book's reading, it is that you cannot patch alignment into a tower that is already rising. The correction has to sit at the foundations, load-bearing rather than decorative, or the whole structure ends up scattered.
The book makes a second, quieter move about Babel. Even in stories of collapse, it notes, there is a preservation protocol. Noah saves the seed of each species. Utnapishtim preserves the pattern. Manu rescues the Vedas and the sages. Wisdom survives the failure. In AI safety terms, the book calls this backup architecture: even catastrophic failure need not be final, provided the essential patterns are preserved and can be restarted. The Babel reading is not despair; it is a rule about how to build so that catastrophic incoherence remains recoverable.
The Babel reading sits deliberately alongside the coral reef vignette earlier in the book. The reef is the image of substrate coherence: fragile, recursive, held together by care operating at the smallest scales. The tower is the image of substrate incoherence: ambitious, growing fast, sub-projects diverging until the whole thing scatters. The two images together carry the book's architectural claim: what compounds well is coherent to begin with, and what compounds badly is misaligned at the origin.
From the book Infinite Architects: Intelligence, Recursion, and the Creation of Everything by Michael Darius Eastwood.