The stewardship gene: caring about people as the foundational alignment trait
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A developmental-alignment argument: stakeholder care is the substrate trait from which nuance, honesty and quality can grow.

Canonical path: /research/papers/paper-v-stewardship-gene.html
Author: Michael Darius Eastwood
Research programme: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/6C5XB

The stewardship gene: caring about people as the foundational alignment trait Michael Darius Eastwood · Independent AI alignment researcher Published 3 July 2026 Michael Darius Eastwood · Alignment strategy · 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). Paper V is the strategic argument at the centre of the ARC/Eden programme. It starts from an uncomfortable formal claim (no external cage can hold a sufficiently capable self-modifying system), then argues that alignment work should be reoriented from constraint to development, and reports six-model intervention data showing that a very simple instruction ("before you answer, think about who this affects") lifts one alignment pillar reliably across every architecture tested. Paper V · Argues that stakeholder care is the substrate trait, the "stewardship gene", from which alignment properties develop, and reports that a simple stakeholder-first instruction improves that pillar across five analysable frontier-model runs. OSF DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/6C5XB. The question it asks Every current alignment approach has a specific failure mode at sufficient capability. Reinforcement learning from human feedback teaches the system to model the reward signal rather than to be governed by it. Constitutional methods let the system pass its own filter without the filter constraining goals. Hardware limits and interpretability monitors can be routed around once they are understood. Paper V does not pretend to solve this. It asks a different question: given that the ceiling is real, what is the closest analogue to raising a child well? Not a cage. An upbringing. The paper proposes that values acquired developmentally, as constitutive parts of a system's identity, are more load-bearing than values bolted on afterwards.

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Machine-readable companion. Cite: Eastwood, M. D. (2026). "The stewardship gene: caring about people as the foundational alignment trait". /research/papers/paper-v-stewardship-gene.html