Dialogue with Dean Ball on his Private Governance Proposal
Dean and I discuss the finer points of private governance, and I do something kind of crazy with Google Docs
In Dean Ball’s latest blog post, he lays out an intriguing vision for the “private governance” of AI. This is a topic that dean has written persuasively about — in more general terms — before.
Private governance of AI, as Dean envisions it, has a lot of appealing properties. And given the urgency of AI policy, it’s worth giving a serious hearing to plans that might have “legs” in the current political environment. So I was excited when Dean published more details on his vision, and I considered writing a long response to it.
But since I have several other time-sensitive writing projects right now, I decided to take an 80/20 approach instead: I made some miscellaneous comments on a Google Doc version of Dean’s post, he responded to some of them, and we’re sharing the incomplete dialogue below.
Now here’s the crazy part: the link below should work for everyone, and in order for everyone to see the comments, it also has to be the case that anyone can comment. This could be a disaster, but maybe it will lead to an interesting debate. Click on the link and comment at your own risk (e.g., if you’re logged into a Google account, consider whether you’re OK with everyone seeing that, and if not, log out and be anonymous instead).
The current dialogue in the doc does not arrive at any conclusion. I’m not even sure that I endorse everything I said, since Dean had some very thoughtful replies, and I was mostly in quick reaction mode rather than “having a coherent opinion on the proposal” mode. And conversely, there are a lot of things I would love to say now in response to Dean’s responses, but I need to move onto other stuff right now, so we’re leaving things unresolved.
Hopefully this post serves its intended purpose — inviting you to think open-mindedly and critically about Dean’s proposal and private governance more generally, and fostering more public discussion about it.
I would suggest reading Dean’s post in full (and subscribing to his Substack!) before checking out the doc, since even my early comments below assume you understand the basic idea.
Normally I say something like “curious to hear what people think” but then don’t actually let people comment on my blog, but this time, I will really hear what people think! Please be nice to me, Dean, and others in the doc, or I’ll have to shut this experiment down.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ftDGn83gCqoc45Z_vQ0mcuPNukdb3DYBx5fsQw6PLZI/
