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Nooriam: Solving AI Coordination Problems
Sovereign legal infrastructure helps solve a material coordination problem facing governments everywhere: rapid propagation of AI systems which compel usage but with no ready means of coordination and machine speed governance.
Rapid distribution of AI across digital, social and institutional systems causes new coordination problems.
What is a coordination problem and why do I care?
A coordination problem describes a situation where aligned interests can still fail to produce aligned action because players can't be sure what the others will do. Coordination problems include arms races and the tragedy of the commons.
Scott Alexander’s 2014 essay "Meditations on Moloch" is the piece that turned Moloch into the standard handle for the coordination problem. Alexander took Allen Ginsberg's image of Moloch from Howl, the ancient deity associated with child sacrifice and repurposed it as a name for the impersonal logic of coordination failure. “Molech” does not require malevolence or evil people - just a competitive system with no referee.
For example, in an arms race, nations will compete to increase their military spending. Every increase in spending by a perceived external threat, necessitates retaliatory spending at the expense of other spending. The relative position remains the same, but the absolute position is worse.
The solution is to recognise the trap and coordinate: ceasefires, peace talks or non-proliferations treaties.
The Coordination Problem in the AI race
The AI race has a coordination problem. The world may potentially benefit from its productivity gains but where a system is pervasive across so many sectors, it also can produce negative externalities such as destruction of industries, loss of human attention and input, and governance failures, which can’t be escaped because we still have to use the AI systems to avoid falling behind.
James Stephen Brown, mentions what we shouldn’t do:
- Focus on one variable.
- Implement one measure.
- If it fails for any reason, scrap the program.
Nooriam helps solve the AI Coordination Problem
Nooriam is designed to coordinate trust in AI deployment.
Nooriam allows organisations to legally share permissions and allocate AI and data rights and obligations dynamically at scale.
Nooriam technology resolves the Legal Attribution Gap (another formal name for the AI coordination problem) using perhaps the most ubiquitous and millennia old coordination mechanism: the legal contract.
Links to essays:
- Scott Alexander: (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/))
- James Stephen Brown (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/wDX7LJSytg8dLKnxp (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/wDX7LJSytg8dLKnxp))