I would like to announce my new alignment organization. We have no funding as of yet, but we have a lot of exciting plans and schemes.
Our alignment philosophy is simple: we cannot align AI’s to human values until we know approximately what human values actually are, and we cannot know that until we solve the human alignment problem. Thus we will both operate as an AI alignment certification organization, and as a peacebuilding organization to solve human-on-human conflicts.
Our main novel idea is the Coordination Market. This is an equivalent to a prediction market for issues that are matters of opinion rather than matters of fact. In the rest of this post, we outline how a coordination market works, and provide a worked example, allowing more housing to be built in the Bay area.
A coordination market has futures that resolve upon a specified event in the real world, just like a prediction market. So, for the Bay area housing market, the futures will resolve when a proposed development is approved, built, and open for tenants to move into.
The futures are associated with different drafts of proposals. People betting in a coordination market are trying to put their money on the proposal that will end up winning. Since 90% of getting a winning political coalition together is signaling that you already have most of the coalition you need, these bets also function as a sort of “thumb on the scale”: people with lots of money can influence the outcome, a little bit, but if their thumb is too heavy on the scale, then they’ll lose whatever money they’re using to weight the scale, and they won’t have a thumb to put on the scale next time it comes up.
In parallel to the coordination market, we add a liquid democracy component to gauge public opinion in the relevant part of the world. For instance, to build a building in Berkeley one presumably needs a coalition of voters sufficient to replace whoever is responsible for appointing the zoning committee. So, a developer trying to build a development would need to set up a coalition of likely voters sufficient to intimidate any zoning board members who stood in the way of the project. At the same time, the developer could only assemble this coalition by genuinely seeking and obtaining meaningful consent from local stakeholders. So the liquid democracy component does a nice job of balancing local democratic ideals with the overwhelming public need for more housing in Berkeley.
We also envision that there would be a forum that people could post on, that would intertwine with the liquid democracy structure. So people talking on the forum would have their posts ranked and decorated by the amount of democracy liquid that the poster has acquired. If Peacecraft ever receives any funding, then people would eventually receive compensation for their posts commensurate with the trust that the community has placed in them. This would have an effect similar to congresspeople being able to draw salaries and hire staffers.
Finally, whoever drafts a winning proposal in a coordination market receives a fraction of the total payout called the “rake”. The rake is specified at the time of proposal creation by the creator of the proposal. It is sort of like the spread in a traditional market; it is a reward for good market-making services. The drafter of the winning proposal also receives the right to administer whatever solution is adopted. For housing developments, this would be the right to actually build the development and receive the profits from doing so. For more nebulous issues like “animal rights”, it would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis by the administrators of the coordination market what that would actually mean.
Thank you for reading my post, and please wish us luck!
We are Peacecraft.ai!
I would like to announce my new alignment organization. We have no funding as of yet, but we have a lot of exciting plans and schemes.
Our alignment philosophy is simple: we cannot align AI’s to human values until we know approximately what human values actually are, and we cannot know that until we solve the human alignment problem. Thus we will both operate as an AI alignment certification organization, and as a peacebuilding organization to solve human-on-human conflicts.
Our main novel idea is the Coordination Market. This is an equivalent to a prediction market for issues that are matters of opinion rather than matters of fact. In the rest of this post, we outline how a coordination market works, and provide a worked example, allowing more housing to be built in the Bay area.
A coordination market has futures that resolve upon a specified event in the real world, just like a prediction market. So, for the Bay area housing market, the futures will resolve when a proposed development is approved, built, and open for tenants to move into.
The futures are associated with different drafts of proposals. People betting in a coordination market are trying to put their money on the proposal that will end up winning. Since 90% of getting a winning political coalition together is signaling that you already have most of the coalition you need, these bets also function as a sort of “thumb on the scale”: people with lots of money can influence the outcome, a little bit, but if their thumb is too heavy on the scale, then they’ll lose whatever money they’re using to weight the scale, and they won’t have a thumb to put on the scale next time it comes up.
In parallel to the coordination market, we add a liquid democracy component to gauge public opinion in the relevant part of the world. For instance, to build a building in Berkeley one presumably needs a coalition of voters sufficient to replace whoever is responsible for appointing the zoning committee. So, a developer trying to build a development would need to set up a coalition of likely voters sufficient to intimidate any zoning board members who stood in the way of the project. At the same time, the developer could only assemble this coalition by genuinely seeking and obtaining meaningful consent from local stakeholders. So the liquid democracy component does a nice job of balancing local democratic ideals with the overwhelming public need for more housing in Berkeley.
We also envision that there would be a forum that people could post on, that would intertwine with the liquid democracy structure. So people talking on the forum would have their posts ranked and decorated by the amount of democracy liquid that the poster has acquired. If Peacecraft ever receives any funding, then people would eventually receive compensation for their posts commensurate with the trust that the community has placed in them. This would have an effect similar to congresspeople being able to draw salaries and hire staffers.
Finally, whoever drafts a winning proposal in a coordination market receives a fraction of the total payout called the “rake”. The rake is specified at the time of proposal creation by the creator of the proposal. It is sort of like the spread in a traditional market; it is a reward for good market-making services. The drafter of the winning proposal also receives the right to administer whatever solution is adopted. For housing developments, this would be the right to actually build the development and receive the profits from doing so. For more nebulous issues like “animal rights”, it would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis by the administrators of the coordination market what that would actually mean.
Thank you for reading my post, and please wish us luck!