Introduction
Our documentary takes a distinctive approach to exploring humanity’s rapidly evolving relationship with artificial intelligence. It places this moment in the context of life’s major evolutionary transitions—rare and transformative events that have expanded life’s biological, informational, social, and technological complexity over billions of years. Seeing AI through this larger lens reveals possibilities we may miss when we focus on immediate impacts.
We make the case that humanity is undergoing a major evolutionary transition today, and that recognizing it as such provides a perspective no other framework can offer. It allows us to fully appreciate the magnitude of the moment we’re experiencing.
Major transitions unfold along two interconnected dimensions: new ways for individual entities to align their interests and cooperate in larger, more capable wholes, and new ways of using information to coordinate cooperation and keep the parts of the whole in alignment.
By examining how cooperation and information systems coevolved in the past—from the origin of the simplest biological cells to the emergence of complex technological civilizations—we gain insights into the processes through which information facilitated cooperation and maintained alignment in a diverse range of settings, each in its own unique way.
This approach sets the stage for our documentary to ask more imaginative and forward-looking questions about the role of AI in humanity’s future. It challenges us to understand our moment as a period with profound potential for cooperative evolutionary change.
Many efforts to understand AI’s impacts approach the topic from a passive perspective: How will AI reshape our minds, our institutions, our future? What role will humans play in a world dominated by AI? These are critical questions, but they obscure an equally important truth—that humanity still has agency in shaping how this transition unfolds.
Coming from a perspective of active human agency allows us to ask a different question: How might we shape AI to help us create a future worth wanting, by fostering more aligned, cooperative relationships with one another and with the natural systems of Earth?
The following synopsis begins with the scientific foundations of the concept, then turns to the film’s narrative design, and concludes with a description of a serial production strategy, intended to engage and build an early audience.
Concept
The AI alignment problem is typically defined as the challenge of ensuring that AI behaviors and actions are compatible with human values and goals. Solving it is broadly considered essential to the safe development of AI. That technological problem—while formidable—is only part of a much larger challenge. It ignores the reality that we humans are far from aligned with one another on many issues that matter most.
Lack of human alignment cripples our ability to take collective action to address critical threats such as climate change, ecological decline, and nuclear war—even though we have a powerful collective interest in addressing them. These are all issues that AI—if well-aligned with human values and goals—could help us address much more effectively. Major transitions are life’s method of achieving alignment in order to take collective action.
The first major transition was when nonliving chemical replicators cooperated and gave rise to the simplest living cells, followed by simple cells cooperating to form complex cells, and then complex cells coming together to form multicellular organisms. Multicellular organisms formed social groups, eventually leading to human hunter-gatherers, the first agricultural societies, cities, nation-states, and our emerging planetary civilization.
Despite these vastly different expressions, all major evolutionary transitions follow the same set of underlying processes. They occur when individual entities cooperate around shared interests, suppress internal conflict, and evolve new kinds of division of labor that enables them to cooperate synergistically as parts of a larger whole. They also evolve new systems for storing, using, and communicating information to coordinate activities among their component parts.
These information systems increased in complexity with each transition as well. The simplest cells used the genetic code that persists in every organism today. Complex cells evolved new methods of intracellular signaling. Multicellular organisms developed epigenetic regulation, nervous systems, and sensory systems. Humans evolved symbolic language, which launched cultural and technological evolution. Writing and printing followed, and electronic information technologies—telegraph, telephone, radio, and television—began accelerating the process.
The first digital computers put humanity on the path to artificial intelligence, leading to the alignment challenges we face today. Technological evolution has been central to major transitions since our ancestors first began to shape stone tools, and the way we used different technologies has always had a strong influence on how we cooperate and align around shared goals. Nevertheless, AI seems to present new challenges we’ve never before faced.
If we are indeed undergoing a major transition in the modern world, what might it mean for humans—and our rapidly advancing AI systems—to align with each other and function as cooperating components of a hybrid system? How do we maintain our humanity if we become increasingly interdependent with thinking machines? Which aspects and features of earlier transitions provide the most useful insights into the challenges we face today?
These are among the questions that Evolving Alignment sets out to investigate. The goal is to understand how cooperation, alignment, and information systems emerged in earlier transitions—in both biology and culture—to explore the possibility that similar dynamics may be shaping the relationship now forming between individuals, societies, and increasingly capable AIs.
Exploring these ideas from the perspective of major transitions brings us back to the overarching question we posed at the start—what kind of society do we want, and how can we shape AI to help us create it?
This is the first time a species undergoing a major transition could be aware it was happening and have the power to influence its course. Understanding these evolutionary processes provides guidance for navigating this moment with greater clarity and purpose, and imagining how we can shape a future we consciously choose, rather than passively inherit. Our hope is that this documentary is not only enlightening, but also empowering.
The Documentary
Evolving Alignment is a feature-length documentary that weaves together two interconnected storylines. Together, they illuminate what may be one of the most consequential evolutionary transitions in the history of life—possibly on a par with the coevolution of symbolic language, brains, and human social groups at the dawn of our species. It is an exercise in investigative journalism, exploring core questions about the future of humanity and AI with an open mind.
The first storyline looks back into deep evolutionary time, exploring how cooperation, alignment around shared interests, and new information systems have repeatedly transformed the architecture of living systems. These segments introduce the scientific foundations of the Major Evolutionary Transitions framework through the biological processes that pre-dated humans, revealing both the common patterns these transitions share and the distinct ways each is expressed. The greatest portion of screen time focuses on the biocultural transition that accompanied the emergence of symbolic language, since it provides the most illuminating parallels with the present transition now unfolding between humanity and AI.
The second storyline turns to the present, tracing the rapidly unfolding relationship between humanity and AI. By examining how AI is reshaping communication, education, business, governance, culture, and even personal relationships, the film investigates whether today’s transformations reflect early markers of a modern evolutionary transition—one in which humans and AI systems become interdependent partners in a larger cooperative whole, aligned in a hybrid ecosystem toward shared purposes and goals.
Segments built from these two narratives—one ancient, one contemporary—are intercut throughout the film. Each illuminates aspects of the other: the deep past offers a map for understanding the forces at work today, while the present gives new relevance to evolutionary dynamics that have shaped life for billions of years.
The film culminates in a scenario planning process in which experts use the evolutionary transitions framework as a foundation for exploring a range of possible paths for the coevolution of humanity and AI. Rather than predicting what will happen, this process illuminates the choices before us—choices that may determine whether emerging AI systems deepen human conflict or help enable a new era of cooperation and planetary flourishing.
Serial Production Approach
To support the documentary and cultivate an informed audience, Evolving Alignment will be produced through a serial, multi-stage approach. This model allows us to develop ideas in depth, refine them through public engagement, and build interest well before the release of the final film.
Throughout production, we will publish a series of short films, essays, and interviews on platforms such as Substack and YouTube. These pieces will explore the documentary’s key themes—including symbolic language, evolutionary transitions, alignment, cooperation, the role of information systems, and the emerging relationship between humans and AI.
This serialized content serves several purposes. It deepens public understanding of the film’s core ideas. It allows us to respond to evolving developments in AI. It helps build a community of supporters and funders invested in the project’s vision. And it creates early opportunities for collaboration with researchers, technologists, and thinkers whose work will enrich the final documentary.
The feature-length film will integrate the insights, stories, interviews, and public engagement generated throughout this serial process. This approach ensures that Evolving Alignment reflects the most current thinking, fosters meaningful public dialogue, and reaches an audience already primed for its message.
