MIP#: 101
Title: Maker Atlas Immutable Alignment Artifact
Author(s): @rune
Contributors:
Tags: constitution, endgame, pregame
Type: General
Status: Accepted
Date Proposed: 2023-01-31
Date Ratified: 2023-03-27
Dependencies:
Replaces:
Forum URL: <https://forum.makerdao.com/t/mip101-the-maker-constitution/19621/>
Ratification Poll URL: <https://vote.makerdao.com/polling/Qmbndmkr#vote-breakdown>
Organizational alignment is a traditional business concept and can be described as the process of implementing strategies and philosophies to ensure that each member of an organization, from entry-level positions to executive managers, shares a common goal and vision for the success of an organization.
Ecosystem Intelligence is a way to look at a decentralized ecosystem as a single entity that acts with a greater or lesser amount of intelligence. Ecosystem Intelligence isn’t just determined by the sum of the intelligence of each of its constituent parts, but also of the alignment of them. Counterintuitively, very intelligent, but spiritually misaligned participants in a decentralized ecosystem will actually lower its Ecosystem Intelligence.
An aligned structure is a network, ecosystem, entity, organization that actively employs alignment engineering.
Universal Alignment means an actor holistically understands their connection to their external context, and can extrapolate how their actions impact everything else, and the second order effects that reflect back on the actor, in the context of human morality and values and the natural world. Being universally aligned allows an actor to understand the intention of universally aligned rules, and discover discrepancies between the technical incentives of rules and their universal intention. Lacking universal alignment, or acting in a way that is against universal alignment, is being misaligned. Preventing misalignment is the fundamental objective of Alignment Engineering and Alignment Artifacts.
Universal Alignment is a spectrum, and actors are more or less Universally Aligned.
In theory Universal Alignment is absolute, but in practice it cannot be measured deterministically and thus practically will always be subject to debate and changes over time. Alignment Engineering aims to minimize the degree that actors experience their own, and others, Universal Alignment changing over time.
The Strength of an Alignment Artifact determines the minimum level of universal alignment required for an actor to, upon interaction with the Alignment Artifact, take universally aligned actions.
Alignment Artifact Strength occurs by making sure the Ecosystem Intelligence evolves such that each actor’s self-interested incentives correspond as precisely as possible with requirements of Universal Alignment, so that misalignment can be overcome with minimal Inner Incentive.
Inner incentive is the second-order incentive that a universally aligned actor uses to counteract the first-order (or self-interested) incentives that are present pre-Alignment Engineering and/or caused by a misaligned structure.