Emergency alignment is the temporary realignment of actions to the values we hold in a crisis.

We shift some but not all values in a crisis, and we might not know exactly how we shift them.

Even cohesive teams disagree on when a crisis starts, so decide in advance who can declare one.

Transitions between value sets require practice and teams benefit from naming the transition out loud.

As a society we generally feel it is bad to stab people. In some cases, however, we are pro stabbing.

Imagine you’re leading a team in the emergency department that’s working on a bicyclist who was run over by a car. Your initial exam shows air building up from a punctured lung and squeezing his heart – if you don’t stab into his chest with a needle or a scalpel right now, there’s a good chance he will die.

How do we know what actions are “right” in this moment? What do we judge them against? We can decide how to proceed by considering value alignment.

Alignment is one of the most important topics in human-AI teaming today. Defined broadly, it is the art and science of making sure actions (ours and those of the AIs working for us) line up with our deepest values. Structurally, it involves deciding what we value, condensing that into a form clear enough to teach, then auditing actions to see whether they match what we intended.

For human-AI teams, alignment means teaching AI models the values we want them to embody (for example, do not teach someone how to synthesize a bioweapon, even if they ask you to), and then observing them in simulated and wild environments to determine if their actions match our values. [1]

So, what happens to alignment in a crisis? In this case, the answer feels simple: We value not stabbing people, but we value saving lives more.

Moving between different value sets is rarely so simple. Enter the concept of emergency alignment, which we can define as the temporary realignment of actions to a set of emergency values that we........

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