Alignment Is to a Virtual Governor: A Theory of Coordination in Diverse Intelligence

Benjamin Lyons, Léo Pio-Lopez, Michael LevinAbstractAlignment is a central problem in systems composed of diverse, interacting components, from biological development to social and engineered systems. One crucial aspect of this problem is determining an answer to the question of to whom or to what the alignment should be. We argue that in decentralized systems, alignment is necessarily to a virtual governor, an abstract governing entity embodied in the coordinating relationships among agents, su...