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For humanity to maintain and expand its agency into the future, the most powerful systems we create must be those which act to align the future with the will of humanity. The most powerful systems today are massive institutions like governments, firms, and NGOs. Deliberative technology is already being used across these institutions to help align governance and diplomacy with human will, and modern AI is poised to make this technology significantly better. At the same time, the race to superhuman AGI is already underway, and the AI systems it gives rise to may become the most powerful systems of the future. Failure to align the impact of such powerful AI with the will of humanity may lead to catastrophic consequences, while success may unleash abundance. Right now, there is a window of opportunity to use deliberative technology to align the impact of powerful AI with the will of humanity. Moreover, it may be possible to engineer a symbiotic coupling between powerful AI and deliberative alignment systems such that the quality of alignment improves as AI capabilities increase.

We design and test an efficient democratic process for developing policies that reflect informed public will. The process combines AI-enabled collective dialogues that make deliberation democratically viable at scale with bridging-based ranking for automated consensus discovery. A GPT4-powered pipeline translates points of consensus into representative policy clauses from which an initial policy is assembled. The initial policy is iteratively refined with the input of experts and the public before a final vote and evaluation. We test the process three times with the US public, developing policy guidelines for AI assistants related to medical advice, vaccine information, and wars & conflicts. We show the process can be run in two weeks with 1500+ participants for around $10,000, and that it generates policy guidelines with strong public support across demographic divides. We measure 75-81% support for the policy guidelines overall, and no less than 70-75% support across demographic splits spanning age, gender, religion, race, education, and political party. Overall, this work demonstrates an end-to-end proof of concept for a process we believe can help AI labs develop common-ground policies, governing bodies break political gridlock, and diplomats accelerate peace deals., Comment: Report produced as part of OpenAI Democratic inputs to AI grant program (2023)