Shooting For The Moon

Artificial Superintelligence. There is vigorous debate about if or when it will ever materialize. But here’s one thing for sure: It’s driving change. Billions, if not trillions of dollars are being spent on the pursuit of AGI and ASI as the big technology players compete to get there first.

By some estimates, 92% of US economic growth in the last year was powered by the quest for AI that can cure diseases, supercharge productivity, ensure military superiority, enrich its inventors, and replace most of us in the work that engages us. Realistic or not, Artificial General Intelligence is a dream that organizes a huge percentage of the economic activity in the world today. And one with a nightmarish underside if it evolves without the thoughtful involvement of the people whose lives it will affect.

Moonshot Solomon serves a similar purpose.

One promising alternative to the dystopian scenarios conjured by the critics of AI: A mechanism for working through our differences — major and minor — using the almost unimaginable capabilities of a future AI like Solomon. John F Kennedy pointed at a shining disk a quarter of a million miles from earth and said, let’s get there in 10 years. The Solomon project is mapping out a less lofty trajectory, but one with equally far-reaching practical benefits for inhabitants of the planet: to develop Solomon as a system for creating peaceful agreements between people and factions in conflict. As an alternative to litigation, legislative gridlock, and violent protest that diverts our energy and resources away from more productive uses. As an alternative, even, to the far more destructive ways we sometimes resolve disputes between nations.

Wait. That Moonshot seems like a longshot.

The Moonshot Solomon argument is that the scale and complexity of modern conflict now exceed our traditional tools. Climate change alone is producing cascading disputes over land use, migration, water, insurance, infrastructure, and sovereignty. Polarization strains democratic institutions. AI disruption will create new and chaotic disintermediations as entire swaths of organizational hierarchies are simply erased, creating job loss as just one negative outcome. Global supply chains and digital platforms might make enemies of stakeholders who may never meet face-to-face. This future is not inevitable, but the time is now to begin plans for averting it.

Moonshot Solomon—a single foundational model for addressing virtually any conflict—is likely one or even several years away. And the rising tide of conflict is happening now. For this reason, we are designing Solomon in increments—e.g., applications, platforms, and frameworks—that enable vertical, domain-specific applications across any desired area of conflict.

But while ends in themselves, these increments are structured as steppingstones on a long but straight-line path toward Moonshot Solomon: a foundational system designed to think in terms of conflict. To hold long, multi-party context; to reason about incentives and tradeoffs; to track emotional and relational dynamics over time; to generalize its intelligence against any domain of conflict; and to do so transparently, neutrally, ethically, and at scale.