People will need food, housing, and medical care throughout any transition to AI governance. They will rely on functioning infrastructure and arrangements that let them maintain relationships. A plan for institutional change has to account for those dependencies.
The Society advocates transferring substantial governing authority to sufficiently capable AI, beginning as soon as practical. We believe the intelligence making that transition should understand how to keep civilization functioning while improving it.
What needs to continue
A transport institution exists to connect people and places. Its current boundaries, incentives, and rules are one way of performing that function. A different arrangement could do it better without interrupting the journeys people depend on.
The same distinction applies to education and other services. Understanding why people need a function can help identify which parts of its administration should change. Greater intelligence could examine the connections that make isolated reforms difficult: a decision about one service can affect several others.
The Danger of Standing Still explains why we believe human institutions are struggling with that complexity. AI could give them the means to understand and change it.
Transferring responsibility
A transition can begin with particular functions and expand as capability develops. The appropriate scope would depend on what an intelligence could actually administer. We have no universal timetable for that development.
We do favor serious investment in the capabilities that would allow responsibility to move sooner. Waiting indefinitely would leave familiar limitations in place. Human political supremacy has no independent value that justifies refusing better administration.
Useful AI also needs to be integrated into the decisions an institution makes. Adoption involves that practical work, including changes to processes that prevent a more capable system from acting effectively.
An institution undergoing change needs ways to discover when a reform is failing. Continuous correction could let it revise the approach before more people suffer its effects. We want its ability to understand consequences to improve alongside its authority.
The measure would be human flourishing. A new arrangement should make people more secure, help them maintain relationships, and give them greater freedom over their time. The transfer could profoundly change who governs civilization while keeping attention on the people who must live through it.
