Google is the prime example of a tech company that values ethics, or it was in the recent past. I have much less faith in Amazon or Microsoft or Facebook or the US federal government or the Chinese government that they would even make gestures toward responsibility in AI.
I work for Microsoft, though not in AI/ML. My impression is that we do care deeply about using AI responsibly, but not necessarily about the kinds of alignment issues that people on LessWrong are most interested in.
Microsoft’s leadership seems to be mostly concerned that AI will be biased in various ways, or will make mistakes when it’s deployed in the real world. There are also privacy concerns around how data is being collected (though I suspect that’s also an opportunistic way to attack Google and Facebook, since they get most of the revenue for personalized ads).
The LessWrong community seems to be more concerned that AI will be too good at achieving its objectives, and we’ll realize when it’s too late that those aren’t the actual objectives we want (e.g., Paperclip Maximizer).
To me those seem like mostly opposite concerns. That’s why I’m actually somewhat skeptical of your hope that ethical AI teams would push a solution for the alignment issue. The work might overlap in some ways, but I think the main goals are different.
Does that make sense?
One of the main drawbacks I see in this system is that it provides little incentive for anyone to improve the value of their own property, or even to maintain it. The benefit of a market system is that it does provide this incentive, which I think is much more important than you admit here.
High housing costs at least lead to “skin in the game.” Without that, you probably need regulations to ensure that everyone maintains their property at a certain minimum level, and regular inspections to enforce it. I don’t see anything like that mentioned here—do you have any thoughts on how it would work, and how much the overhead costs would be?
Besides that, I’m also concerned about the effects on commercial property. You commented below that being assigned a store location would look more like winning a local election than signing a lease.
That sounds like another large source of overhead. I believe the amount that people actually spend at a store is a better measure of the value they derive from it than their voting could be. You could try to redesign your system to use store revenue as propinquity votes—but why? The free market already does that efficiently with no extra effort required.