AI for Bargaining
The basic case for pursuing AI-assisted negotiation seems strong.
At a high level:
- The world faces massive challenges, which could lead to disasters which are in nobody’s interests
- If people were good enough at seeing what was coming and coordinating to respond, the risk of disaster would be driven very low
- We don’t have those capabilities today, but AI assistance could provide a large boost
- It’s unclear whether we will have the necessary capabilities online by the key times, so differential acceleration could be a big deal
The above is our main motivation for working on AI-for-coordination.
(It also justifies some of our interest in AI-for-epistemics.)
Within coordination, we are especially keen on Automated mediation which:
- Works as a neutral third-party to help find mutually desirable outcomes
- Interviews each party separately, and can (up to a point) understand their preferences while respecting bids for confidentiality
- Best for complex multidimensional cases where there may be win-win options available, rather than e.g. haggling over price
We expect AI assisted bargaining to extend humanity’s pareto frontier
We’d like to put attention and resources into advancing augmented human capabilities of bargaining, probably in a two pronged and intertwine-able approach.
- Product focused – find a problem bottlenecked on its ability to bargain and try and build out a tool to solve that problem.
- Building out infrastructure to allow people to explore potential approaches to AI Bargaining (e.g)
- Designing virtual environments and protocols for testing bargaining approaches
- Having a roster of virtual agents to populate virtual environments with
- Know-how and protocols for recruiting humans to test out tools
Reach out if:
- You’re currently building something in this space
- You’re owning something where bargaining is a bottleneck, that either
- (i) you think is important for ensuring the future goes well, or
- (ii) you think might be a good early test-case for this technology
- You want to work on this/ have thoughts on the topic
- Any relevant leads to inform our thinking
