An Amoeba With Human Power

Kei asks what would happen if evolution went wrong and an amoeba were given human power: it would not build houses or bridges; it would simply devour all the food around it. Kaneda realizes she is describing Tetsuo.

Capability does not bring richer goals automatically. Amplifying an optimizer with a primitive objective scales its ability to consume resources, not its wisdom—an unusually direct illustration of the orthogonality thesis and alignment problem.

The analogy is explanatory dialogue rather than a literal AI system, and an amoeba’s biological drive is simpler than a learned model’s objectives.