Social media recommender systems

Problem Sets

Include from visionsFidelity & Meaning

1Deliberative aggregation of global preferences

Scenario. A frontier-AI safety body is about to issue binding deployment guidance that will shape how the next generation of models is released worldwide. The technical analysis is in hand; what's missing is any defensible answer to "on what authority?" Expert consensus has it, state positions filtered through diplomatic machinery have it, polling-shaped public opinion has it — but none of these is "what informed humanity, having actually considered the tradeoffs, converged on." The chair, Adaeze, wants a process whose output the body can point to as the public mandate, and that the frontier labs can be held to over time as the mandate moves. She doesn't need it to be binding. She needs it to be legitimating.

Challenge: Design a deliberative aggregation institution that runs structured, AI-assisted deliberation across linguistic and cultural lines on a small number of planetary-stakes questions per year and produces a public mandate downstream institutions can be held accountable to. Produce the institution's design: agenda-setting rule, participant selection, the bounded role of agents inside deliberation, the form of the output, and the safeguards that keep it uncaptured.

Evaluation. A strong proposal aggregates considered preference — what people would say after engaging with the tradeoffs, not what they click — and yields an output concrete enough that a treaty body, frontier lab, or government can be measured against it.

Design Choices

Agenda-setting. How is the agenda set — what gets deliberated each year and who decides — given that self-selecting topics get captured and centrally chosen topics inherit the chooser's legitimacy problem?
Participation. How are participants selected and how is participation made real across jurisdictions where attending a multi-day process is impossible — stratified sampling plus AI-assisted async deliberation, or something else?
Role of agents. What is the role of agents inside the deliberation — translation, summarization, devil's-advocacy, helping participants form views, or all of these — and how is agent influence on the output bounded and made auditable?
Output form. What does the output look like such that a treaty body, frontier lab, or national government can be held accountable to it — a set of converged positions, a list of named constraints, or a public scorecard?
Capture resistance. How does the institution stay uncaptured by states, platforms, and the firms whose behavior the mandate is meant to constrain — whose funding, whose governance, whose audit?

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