Coordination Studies

Coordination Studies is a new field-building project oriented towards solving coordination problems and designing new coordination mechanisms.

Project Details

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

View application details below for more information >

Theory of Impact

The coordination problem between states and labs is driving the AI race: structurally incentivising the sacrifice of safety for speed and blocking effective international AI governance. The geopolitical human coordination problem is the most important problem generating existential risk alongside and affecting the technical AI alignment problem.

There is a lack of clear coordination mechanisms and institutional designs for global decision-making and resource-allocation in a post-AGI world.* New systems need to be designed in advance, ready to be implemented, to prevent societal disruption, gradual disempowerment and extreme power-concentration.

Coordination studies is the field-building project to operationalise these foundational problems of game-theory and political economy in the development and deployment of AI.

*

Market Capitalism becomes operationally untenable when AI:

drives the cost of human labor to zero, severing the wage-labor loop which distributes purchasing power

People

Max Holly

Founder

Track Record

This is a project I am starting. I am looking for co-founders with research, technical and operations experience.

Grants Received– no grants recorded

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Funding Asks

grantmaking.ai Launch Round

Applied

Coordination Studies is a new field oriented towards solving coordination problems and designing new coordination mechanisms.

Minimum

$5,000

Ideal

$50,000

What this ask is

In its first stage, NCC would run an 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.

The Coordination in Coordination Studies

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

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

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 and policies that support the formation of a new social contract against gradual disempowerment from automation and extreme power concentration.

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

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

How the money will be spent

$5K minimum: would cover 4 months of minimal basic living costs (UK, Oxford) to work on developing and launching the Coordination Forum and the Coordination Fundamentals course.

$50,000 maximum: would cover 1 year of minimal basic living costs ($15K) plus funding for a Coordination (Studies) essay contest ($5K), followed by a blog-writing intensive fellowship ($25K for 5 fellows for 2 months) to seed the field and the forum.
$500,000 ideal: would cover founding an organisation, renting office space and hiring a team of interdisciplinary researchers, communications specialists, software developers, operations staff etc

Discussion

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