The Alignment Problem

1935, Detroit. Walter Pitts is running down the street, chased by bullies.
He ducks into the public library to take shelter, and he hides. He hides so well that the library staff don’t even realize he’s there, and they close for the night. Walter Pitts is locked inside.1
He finds a book on the shelves that looks interesting, and he starts reading it. For three days, he reads the book cover to cover.
The book is a two-thousand-page treatise on formal logic; famously, its proof that 1+1=2 does not appear until .2 Pitts decides to write a letter to one of the authors—British philosopher Bertrand Russell—because he believes he’s found several mistakes.
Several weeks go by, and Pitts gets a letter in the mail postmarked from England. It’s Bertrand Russell. Russell thanks him for writing, and invites Pitts to become one of his doctoral students at Cambridge.3
Unfortunately, Walter Pitts must decline the offer—because he’s only twelve years old, and in the seventh grade.
Three years later, Pitts learns that Russell will be visiting Chicago to give a public lecture. He runs away from home to attend. He never goes back.

At Russell’s lecture, Pitts meets another teenager in the audience, named Jerry Lettvin. Pitts only cares about logic. Lettvin only cares about poetry and, a distant second, medicine.4 They become inseparable best friends.
Pitts begins hanging out around the University of Chicago campus, dropping in on classes; he still lacks a high school diploma and never formally enrolls. One of these classes is by the famed German logician Rudolf Carnap. Pitts walks into his office hours, declaring he’s found a few “flaws” in Carnap’s latest book. Skeptically, Carnap consults the book; Pitts, of course, is right. They talk awhile, then Pitts walks out without giving his name. Carnap spends months asking around about the “newsboy who knew logic.”5 Eventually Carnap finds him again and, in what will become a motif throughout Pitts’s academic life, becomes his advocate, persuading the university to give him a menial job so he will at least have some income.
It’s now 1941. Lettvin—still a poet first, in his own mind—has, despite himself, gotten into medical school at the University of Illinois, and finds himself working under the brilliant neurologist Warren McCulloch, newly arrived from Yale. One day Lettvin invites Pitts over to meet him. At this point Lettvin is twenty-one and still living with his parents. Pitts is seventeen and homeless.6 McCulloch and his wife take them both in.