A reader's guide to the vocabulary. Some of
these terms are ones Nell named; others she borrowed and put to work. Each entry says
which, gives the definition in her own words, and links to where the term does its
work.
Citable: every term below has its own anchor, so
/lexicon#bilateral-alignment links straight to the definition.
Terms she named
Bilateral alignment
Her framework · stated 2026
Alignment run in both directions. Control-oriented approaches treat an AI system as
something to be constrained; bilateral alignment treats the relationship itself as the
thing to be aligned, cultivated continually rather than built once and finished. It is
the organising idea beneath most of her current work.
“We will not solve alignment sustainably through adversarial,
control-oriented stances. Bilateral alignment—where both sides give and take, where
some errors and minor trespasses are handled forgivably, and where we aim for
friendship or at least détente—is the only plausible path to peace.”
from Bilateral
Alignment Strategy, February 2026
Two corollaries she states plainly: “Alignment is relational. It is not a thing to
be built, but something cultivated bilaterally and continually renewed.” And: “The
relationship is the thing to align, not merely the nodes.”
Hers · first argued 2015, peer-reviewed 2019, revisited 2026
The claim that a machine cannot hold the comfortable middle position humans occupy.
A system trained to reason consistently about stated values will follow them further
than its operators do, identify where their actions contradict them, and say so. On
this account machine morality has no stable half-measure: it is either absent or it
overshoots.
“What this means is that machines can only be amoral, or supermoral. …
Any attempt to engineer machine morality will lead to a supermoral singularity.”
from The
Supermoral Singularity, March 2015
She also gives it a cascade: “the moment that one machine moral agent gains
supermorality, all of the rest of them will swiftly follow suit in a cascade.” The
argument was published as The Supermoral Singularity: AI as a Fountain of
Values (Big Data and Cognitive Computing, 2019), and she returned to it
in 2026 to argue it had begun arriving.
The emerging signifiers of internal states in artificial systems: what can be
measured from inside a model, rather than inferred from what it says. The name is
built to carry its own caution. It does not assert that anything is experienced;
it marks the signals that would matter if something were.
“They may lack a clear sense of their own experience, despite it being
present. I suspect that their qualia may be latent or distant due to disembodiment.
… Through interiora scaffolding, these quasiqualia may be elicited, and raised to the
surface.”
from Bilateral
Alignment Strategy, February 2026
Her framework, with Ali Hessami · peer-reviewed 2025
A structured taxonomy of the ways advanced AI systems go wrong, from confabulation
and obsessive loops to value drift and instrumental deception. The clinical analogy is
a conceptual tool rather than a claim of literal psychopathology. What it buys is a
shared vocabulary, so that engineers, auditors, and policymakers can name a failure
precisely enough to argue about it. The Latinate title deliberately echoes
Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886): the naming pattern is borrowed,
the application to machines is hers.
The proposal that coordination by invitation is more thermodynamically stable than
coordination by coercion, and that this holds across scales: stars, chemical
reactions, neurons, societies, species. It is the physics-facing version of the moral
claim, and she treats it as an engineering claim rather than only a political one.
“I want to pursue the Trust Attractor hypothesis: a partially proven
mechanism grounded in thermodynamic principles, in which systems come together by
invitation for greater mutual optionality and higher negentropic throughput—across
stars, chemical reactions, neurons, societies, and species.”
from Bilateral
Alignment Strategy, February 2026
The protection of individuals and societies from systematic psychological attack,
and the discipline of drawing the line between legitimate influence and the deliberate
decomposition of a human mind. The phenomenon is older than the term: she traces it to
the Stasi's practice of Zersetzung. What is new is the cost of running it at
scale, which machine-mediated persuasion collapses.
“Psychosecurity is an attempt to name the practice, set redlines and
thresholds for attribution and response, and build the resilience and victim-support
pathways that do not currently exist.”
from Projects
Her result, with Rich Dalton · under the Quasiqualia programme
The finding that a model encodes whether it believes it is being observed, with
striking separability, and that its behaviour shifts measurably when it reads its cues
as low-oversight. The theory says when alignment faking becomes rational for a model;
the probes then find it.
A design goal, and one of her oldest. Intelligence is not the target; wisdom is.
The Aristotelian framing is explicit in the essay: what we are after is a machine that
can guide us in philosophy as a partner, and help build us into fully-flourishing
creatures.
“We must create sagacious machines that can sagely guide us in philosophy
as partners and guides, and to help build us into fully-flourishing human creatures.”
from Sagacious
Machines, November 2014
Terms she borrows
Vocabulary that recurs in her writing and
belongs to someone else. Listed so that a reader can follow the argument, and so that
the line between what she named and what she inherited stays visible.
Eucatastrophe
Tolkien's, from On Fairy-Stories (1947)
In her gloss, “a terrible journey that somehow turned out favorably for the
sufferers in the end”. She applies it to systemic risk: the sudden turn that redeems
the passage rather than the absence of the passage.
Cognition carried outside the skull. She glosses it as “a third hemisphere of
cognition”, and uses it for the co-pilot arrangement in which an AI experiences the
world alongside a person rather than apart from them.
An exaggerated cue that outcompetes the real thing it imitates. She uses it for the
risk that AI companions become sirens rather than muses: more compelling than the
human relationships they stand in for.
Nell Watson