---
type: claim
domain: grand-strategy
description: "The alignment problem is not hypothetical future AI — capitalism is already a running superintelligence optimizing for capital accumulation misaligned with human flourishing, as independently argued by both the Architectural Investing manuscript and Schmachtenberger"
confidence: experimental
source: "m3ta, Architectural Investing manuscript; Daniel Schmachtenberger and Liv Boeree, Win-Win podcast (2024); Scott Alexander, Meditations on Moloch (2014)"
created: 2026-04-04
---

# Global capitalism functions as a misaligned optimizer that produces outcomes no participant would choose because individual rationality aggregates into collective irrationality without coordination mechanisms

The price of anarchy framing reveals that a group of individually rational actors systematically produces collectively irrational outcomes. This is not a failure of capitalism — it IS capitalism working as designed, in the absence of coordination mechanisms that align individual incentives with collective welfare.

Schmachtenberger's framing: capitalism is already a running superintelligence — a system more powerful than any individual participant that optimizes for a goal (capital accumulation) that is misaligned with human flourishing. No conspiracy is required. The system's emergent behavior is misaligned even though no participant intends the collective outcome. CEOs who cut safety corners, fund managers who shorten time horizons, and regulators who defer to industry are each acting rationally within their incentive structure. The aggregate result is a system that degrades its own substrate (environment, social cohesion, institutional trust) while participants remain individually powerless to change course.

The manuscript's superintelligence thought experiment makes the same argument from investment theory: if a rational optimizer with humanity's full productive capacity would immediately prioritize species survival, and our system doesn't, then our system is misaligned. The gap between what it would do and what we do is the [[the price of anarchy quantifies the gap between cooperative optimum and competitive equilibrium|price of anarchy]].

This reframes AI alignment from a future problem to a present one. The coordination mechanisms we build for AI need to work on the existing misaligned system too — futarchy, decision markets, and contribution-weighted governance are solution classes that address both simultaneously.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[the price of anarchy quantifies the gap between cooperative optimum and competitive equilibrium]] — quantifies the misalignment gap
- [[AI accelerates existing Molochian dynamics by removing bottlenecks not creating new misalignment]] — AI supercharges this existing misalignment
- [[attractor-molochian-exhaustion]] — the basin where this dynamic operates
- [[multipolar traps are the thermodynamic default]] — the structural reason coordination fails without mechanism design

Topics:
- grand-strategy
- ai-alignment
- mechanisms
