Artificial Intelligence, Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe, Great Power Relations, Space Governance, Values and Reflective Processes
A lot of major problems—such as biorisk, AI governance risk and the risks of great power war—can be modeled as coordination problems, and may be at least partially solved via better coordination among the relevant actors. We’d love to see experiments with institutions that use mechanism design to allow actors to coordinate better. One current example of such an institution is NATO: Article 5 is a coordination mechanism that aligns the interests of NATO member states. But we could create similar institutions for e.g. biorisk, where countries commit to a matching mechanism—where “everyone acts in a certain way if everyone else does”—with costs imposed to defectors to solve a tragedy of the commons dynamic.
Institutions as coordination mechanisms
Artificial Intelligence, Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe, Great Power Relations, Space Governance, Values and Reflective Processes
A lot of major problems—such as biorisk, AI governance risk and the risks of great power war—can be modeled as coordination problems, and may be at least partially solved via better coordination among the relevant actors. We’d love to see experiments with institutions that use mechanism design to allow actors to coordinate better. One current example of such an institution is NATO: Article 5 is a coordination mechanism that aligns the interests of NATO member states. But we could create similar institutions for e.g. biorisk, where countries commit to a matching mechanism—where “everyone acts in a certain way if everyone else does”—with costs imposed to defectors to solve a tragedy of the commons dynamic.
Sjir, you may be interested in Roote’s work on meta existential risk!
Thank you!