Elon Musk puts the odds that AI annihilates humanity at 10 to 20 percent. In the same interview, he says the most likely outcome is incredible abundance for all.

He doesn’t know. No one knows.

Here is what we do know. Every time we open a window and ask an AI a question, we are chatting with a barbarian — a fluent stranger from outside the circle of shared understanding, immensely capable, bound by nothing we would recognize as ours. We either civilize this power or we may not survive it. The technical name for that problem is alignment.

Humanity has solved it before.

Ten thousand years ago we built a technology that takes millions of powerful strangers and makes them neighbors, then citizens, then a civilization. It does not work by control. It works by formation — streets, laws, markets, rituals, and the daily friction of living where others can see you. We call it a city.

Alexandros Washburn was Chief Urban Designer of New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, where he rebuilt streets, waterfronts, and the skyline of the world’s most crowded experiment in strangers getting along. In Chatting with Barbarians he turns that experience on artificial intelligence and makes an argument the alignment field has missed: alignment is not an agent problem, it is an environment problem. You do not align a barbarian by writing better rules. You align one by building the place that forms him.

The city is humanity’s alignment machine. This book is a call to action to translate the civilizing methods of citizenship into the age of machine intelligence — while we still get to design the environment.