Blog
Systems of Value and other insights on intelligence, governance, and civic technology.
Systems of Value
My Substack exploring how to embed values into systems using AI. This ongoing series covers frameworks, case studies, and practical approaches to building systems that reflect human values rather than just optimizing for efficiency.
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System Values Analysis Tool
Surfacing the gap between a system's stated values and its behaviours. This tool helps identify where organizations say one thing but do another, making visible the disconnect between values rhetoric and actual system behavior. Read More | Read on Substack
Brendon Hawkins
Moral Alignment: Teaching Systems to Feel
Reclaiming democracy as a continuous act of moral calibration. This post explores how we can teach systems to feel and respond to human values, making moral alignment an ongoing process rather than a one-time configuration. Read More | Read on Substack
Brendon Hawkins
Narrative Values Extractor
A simple tool demonstrator for seeing the moral story inside the news. This custom GPT takes news articles and surfaces the values and conflicts between people and organisations, helping readers understand issues in more depth. Most political debates are really clashes between value systems that remain invisible - this tool makes those hidden assumptions visible so conversations can start with understanding. Read More | Read on Substack
Brendon Hawkins
Articulating Our Values For Systems
Our systems don't have a moral sense. But LLMs know language very well, and might be able to translate our values for them. This post explores how we can use language models to bridge the gap between human values expressed through stories and the formal requirements of system design. Read More | Read on Substack
Brendon Hawkins
An Alignment Chart for Those-Who-Have-Seen-the-Insanity-of-"The-System"-and-Responded-as-Best-They-Can
A fun exploration of how people respond when they encounter friction with "the system". This alignment chart maps nine archetypes across two axes: whether someone has left the system, is partially in it, or fully within it, and their response from constructive to neutral to destructive. From The Dreamer to The Saboteur, these patterns reveal how societies respond to the frictions our systems produce. Read More | Read on Substack
Brendon Hawkins
Authoring Our Values
If we don't author our collective values, systems will do it silently. This post explores the first of four enabling challenges for values-aware systems: authorship. Who decides our values, by what right, and through which procedures? The post examines historical methods of values authorship and how AI might help us reclaim our role in defining the values that shape our systems. Read More | Read on Substack
Brendon Hawkins
Terms of Service Evaluator
A practical demonstration of AI-powered values analysis. This post introduces a custom GPT that evaluates terms of service documents against six core values: accountability, agency, care for children, consent, pluralism, and transparency. The tool provides insights into how organisations operate behind the scenes and demonstrates the potential for building values-aware systems. Read More | Read on Substack
Brendon Hawkins
When AI Becomes the System
Bureaucracy was built with human limits in mind. Advances in AI mean those limits could disappear. This post explores how AI can compress bureaucracy and eliminate it altogether, opening the door to new kinds of values-aware feedback loops that our existing systems were never designed to support. Read More | Read on Substack
Brendon Hawkins
How Values Get Lost in Translation
A framework for how human values move (and get lost) through law, organisations, and interfaces. This post examines the gap between stated values and the values actually embedded in system behavior and decision-making, exploring how values become distorted as they move through organizational systems and bureaucratic processes. Read More | Read on Substack
Brendon Hawkins
Organisations as Emergent, Non-Conscious Intelligences
Our institutions think without feeling. That's why our values need to be designed in. This post examines how organizations develop their own intelligence and decision-making patterns that emerge from collective human behavior, often operating beyond conscious control. It explores the implications for understanding and designing better organizational systems. Read More | Read on Substack
Brendon Hawkins
Aligning Our Systems to Human Values
We demand values alignment from artificial intelligences. Why not our other systems? This post outlines a framework for understanding how to embed human values into system design and decision-making processes, ensuring that our technological and organizational systems reflect rather than undermine human values. Read More | Read on Substack
Brendon Hawkins