What AI progress teaches us about human psychology

The author argues that the practical challenge of designing aligned AI agents illuminates human psychology: evolution, like an AI designer, cannot specify every action, so it endows organisms with reward signals and values that guide decisions in novel situations, and evolutionary mismatch can be understood as a form of misalignment. He connects this to the principal–agent problem, the distinction between decision and experienced utility, and secondary rewards such as money, and suggests AI will push behavioural science back toward functional explanations of cognition.