The Myth of Alignment: Why the AI Industry's Central Promise Is a Question of Power, Not Technology

The AI industry's central promise — that advanced AI systems can be reliably aligned to human values — misframes the problem it claims to solve. Alignment is not primarily a technical challenge but a question of power: who defines the values, who enforces them, and who bears the consequences. Drawing on incentive misalignment in 1990s banking and the structural exclusion of 6.4 billion people from value choices embedded in globally deployed systems, this essay argues that alignment discourse obscures a deeper governance failure. Essay 4 of the series Beyond Control: Theory of Limits of AI Governance by Oybek Khodjaev (INVEXI LLC, Tashkent, Uzbekistan). Full text: https://okhodjaev.com/essays/the-myth-of-alignment/