Construct · 6 fields · 12 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one name, six constructs Nearest construct by meaningtask-technology fitcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to alignment is task-technology fit.
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The problem of ensuring that what an AI system optimizes is what its designers and users actually want, given that the objective written down is never the objective meant. Russell's version is that the standard model (a machine pursuing a fixed, known objective) is the mistake, and machines should instead be uncertain about human preferences and defer to them. Gabriel separated the targets the word could name: instructions, expressed intentions, revealed preferences, informed preferences, well-being, or values, and argued that choosing among them is a normative question, not an engineering one. In practice, Ouyang and colleagues made "aligned" mean fine-tuned by reinforcement learning from human feedback to be helpful, honest, and harmless as judged by raters.[1][2][3]
The degree of fit between business strategy, IT strategy, organizational infrastructure, and IT infrastructure. Henderson and Venkatraman's Strategic Alignment Model laid these out as four domains and argued that value comes from strategic fit (external strategy matched to internal structure) together with functional integration (business matched to IT); they insisted alignment is a process of continuous adaptation, not a state. Chan and Reich's review found the construct measured in a dozen ways (shared domain knowledge, plan linkage, executive perceptions) that rarely agree.[4][5]
The condition in which the goals a person is working toward are the goals the organization needs met, usually engineered by cascading objectives from the top and tying performance to them. The empirical base is Locke and Latham's goal-setting theory: specific, difficult goals to which people are committed produce higher performance than vague or easy ones, and commitment depends on the goal being seen as important and attainable. Kaplan and Norton's balanced scorecard is the managerial device for the cascade. Here alignment is a relation between what a person aims at and what the firm aims at, and the thing being aligned is a goal, not a value.[6][7]
Incentives are aligned when the payoff-maximizing action for the agent is the action the principal wants. Holmström showed that when effort is unobservable, the optimal contract ties pay to any signal that is informative about effort, trading off risk imposed on the agent against the incentive gained; Jensen and Meckling had already named the residual (what remains after the best contract) the agency cost. Alignment is achieved by contract design and is always partial. Nobody in this literature expects the agent's values to change; only the payoffs do.[8][9]
An arrangement of two or more DNA, RNA, or protein sequences, with gaps inserted, that maximizes a similarity score under a substitution matrix and gap penalty. Needleman and Wunsch gave the dynamic-programming algorithm for the global optimum in 1970; Smith and Waterman modified it in 1981 to find the best local alignment (the most similar sub-regions) which is what sequence search tools compute. Alignment here is a computed object with a provably optimal score. There are no values, goals, or parties, and two sequences are aligned by an algorithm, not by anyone's intention.[10][11]
The process by which two people in conversation come to share representations (the same words, the same syntactic constructions, the same situation model) largely through automatic priming rather than deliberate coordination. Pickering and Garrod's interactive-alignment account holds that alignment at one level (say, lexical) percolates to others (say, syntactic and semantic), which is why dialogue is easy where monologue is hard. The aligned things are mental representations; the mechanism is unconscious; and alignment is measured by whether speakers repeat each other.[12]
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