PERSON
James Madison
The principal architect of the American Constitution, whose single unsentimental premise—that power cannot be trusted to restrain itself and so must be made to restrain other power—is the most useful idea anyone has ever had about constraining a capability we do not fully understand.
James Madison never heard the word “algorithm.” He died in 1836, the last surviving framer of the Constitution he had done more than anyone to shape. What he knew was power: its tendency to accumulate, its willingness to override good intentions, the futility of relying on virtue when structure would serve. His single most important sentence—“If men were angels, no government would be necessary”—is, read against artificial intelligence, the most exact statement available of the alignment problem. The sentence asserts that external constraint is necessary precisely because internal constraint is unreliable; that you must build for the world as it is, not as you wish it to be; that structures matter more than intentions, and that the absence of adequate structure is not a minor gap but the condition under which power invariably becomes tyrannical. Madison feared concentrated power and inflamed majorities in equal measure: he designed the extended republic,
the extended