What progress have you made since your last update?
I have moved to part time work to dedicate one day a week to Live Governance research. My research work has now crystallised into 3 sub-projects as outlined below.
Common Law as an Organism: I've made substantial progress towards completing a large body of work that describes common law legal systems as collectively intelligent systems. This research supports a key premise of Live Governance: by conceptualising civilisation as an organism, we can begin to envision governance approaches that transcend the trade-off between global (system-wide) and local functioning.
Live Governance Framework: I've also made significant progress on a substantial body of work that outlines an overarching framework for understanding Live Governance. This framework will provide criteria to distinguish Live Governance interventions from conventional governance approaches, explicate threat and opportunity models within the Live Governance framing, and offer initial directions for policy development.
Live Governance Community Tool: I have begun developing a specific proposal for an AI-enabled community level governance tool that would implement Live Governance principles within the constraints of current AI technologies. I anticipate this will help define the contours of a class of similar interventions that could be implemented at different scales and in different contexts.
What are your next steps?
I plan to continue my one-day-a-week research schedule and aim to complete these sub-projects by the end of September.
Is there anything others could help you with?
Engagement and Collaboration: I am always excited to discuss Live Governance concepts, and would be particularly excited to chat or work with someone who has interest/expertise in the common law and its intersection with philosophy of mind or AI governance.
Funding (for other Live Governance research): Now that I have transitioned to part-time arrangements (one day a week on research, four days a week on non-AI safety work), I am reasonably confident I can continue regardless of funding. However, I am time-constrained and have several Live Governance and Live Governance-adjacent research ideas that I'm unable to pursue. I'd like to devote a greater proportion of my time to this work and will consider dropping to 3-days a week of paid work (this is probably the fewest days' of paid work I could sustainably manage). I'd be happy to make this a full-time commitment, however, this would require funding.