The tower that collapsed under its own incoherence
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The book's reading of Babel: not divine wrath but structural instability, an AI safety concern encoded in narrative form five thousand years ago.

Canonical path: /research/blog/book-the-tower-that-collapsed-under-incoherence.html
Author: Michael Darius Eastwood
Research programme: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6C5XB

The tower that collapsed under its own incoherence: reading Babel Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher Published 3 July 2026 Michael Darius Eastwood · Book companion · 3 July 2026 Michael Darius Eastwood, independent researcher, London: author of the ARC/Eden research programme; the embedded-correction alignment thesis is recorded in a source record dated 8 December 2024 (sent-side SHA-256 f0d1f38f). 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 Incoherence, not jealousy 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. Babel as the Babylon scenario made explicit 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 engineering lesson The chapter draws a direct line from the story to a modern engineering rule: complexity without coherence is unstable.

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Machine-readable companion. Cite: Eastwood, M. D. (2026). "The tower that collapsed under its own incoherence". /research/blog/book-the-tower-that-collapsed-under-incoherence.html