Coordination Studies

The New Centre for Coordination (NCC) is a proposed field-building org for the Coordination (Studies) movement (CS): a new interdisciplinary research field oriented towards solving coordination problems – between humans, AIs and institutions – designing new coordination mechanisms – post-AGI, markets and states and developing new coordination technologies – from targeted applications to full-stack infrastructure.

In its first stage, NCC would run a Coordination Fundamentals course (BlueDot Impact style) from which select alumni, based on their capstone project, would progress into the first cohort of a Coordination Studies Blog-Writing Intensive (Roots of Progress Institute style). This would be accompanied by a Coordination Studies Essay Contest to incentivise a wider range of entries and begin to create a wider research community.
The output of these two initiatives would be used to seed the field and the new Coordination Forum, an extended conception of an AI governance forum to parallel the AI alignment forum.

Following this early field-building stage, CoordinationCon2027 would bring this new research community together with relevant actors in AI safety and governance to coordinate IRL.

Ultimately, Coordination Studies serves as the academic division of a wider Coordination (studies) movement – emulating the Progress (studies) movement, as a similar-style spin-off from rationalism and effective altruism.

The Coordination in Coordination Studies

Broadly framed, I would say there are four areas of coordination encompassed within what I am calling Coordination Studies:

Coordination to Slow the AI Race: regulations (national and international) for the development and deployment of AI, getting new mechanisms in place that slow down the race to God-like AI between labs and states.

• see the MIRI International Treaty;  ControlAI’s Direct Institutional Plan;  FLI-CHT’s The Human Movement

Coordination Technology: from targeted technical applications (e.g automated negotiation) to full-stack infrastructure (e.g. AI delegates and preference elicitation). Also social coordination technology such as pre-commitment platforms, professional networking, personal relationships.

• see Design Sketches: Defense-Favoured Coordination Tech Forethought;  AI for Epistemics & Coordination Fellowship Future of Life Foundation; Supercooperation The Future of AI for Democracy Foresight Institute

Coordination Systems: political and economic systems that structure human collective action and collective intelligence; policies that support the formation of a new social contract against gradual disempowerment and extreme power concentration from automation.

• see The Internet Government;  The Integral Economy;  Windfall Policy Atlas

Coordination between AIs: designing multi-agent architectures and environments for AI agents to interact; shaping AI constitutions and character to favour pro-social coordination over narrowly self-interested defection.

• see CooperativeAI; Distributional AI Safety DeepMind; The Artificial Self ACS

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