Report by the Metagov community: “First, it identifies distinct layers of the AI stack that can be named and reimagined. Second, for each layer, it points to potential strategies, grounded in existing projects, that could steer that layer toward meaningful collective governance.
We understand collective governance as an emergent and context-sensitive practice that makes structures of power accountable to those affected by them. It can take many forms—sometimes highly participatory, and sometimes more representative. It might mean voting on members of a board, proposing a policy, submitting a code improvement, organizing a union, holding a potluck, or many other things. Governance is not only something that humans do; we (and our AIs) are part of broader ecosystems that might be part of governance processes as well. In that sense, a drought caused by AI-accelerated climate change is an input to governance. A bee dance and a village assembly could both be part of AI alignment protocols.
The idea of “points of intervention” here comes from the systems thinker Donella Meadows—especially her essay “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System.” One idea that she stresses there is the power of feedback loops, which is when change in one part of a system produces change in another, and that in turn creates further change in the first, and so on. Collective governance is a way of introducing powerful feedback loops that draw on diverse knowledge and experience.
We recognize that not everyone is comfortable referring to these technologies as “intelligence.” We use the term “AI” most of all because it is now familiar to most people, as a shorthand for a set of technologies that are rapidly growing in adoption and hype. But a fundamental premise of ours is that this technology should enable, inspire, and augment human intelligence, not replace it. The best way to ensure that is to cultivate spaces of creative, collective governance.
These points of intervention do not focus on asserting ethical best practices for AI, or on defining what AI should look like or how it should work. We hope that, in the struggle to cultivate self-governance, healthy norms will evolve and sharpen in ways that we cannot now anticipate. But democracy is an opportunity, never a guarantee…(More)”
