We already deal with entities with theoretically limitless capabilities. They're called either corporations or states or organizations. Organizations potentially are ever growing.
Of course if AI ever obtained superhuman abilities, the first place these abilities would be deployed is in a corporation or state.
The great AI danger is a corporate danger. Wielding a corporation, the AI automatically obtains all the abilities of the individual humans making up a corporation, and AI can manipulate humanity the traditional way, through money. Any ability the AI lacks, well, AI can just hire the right people to fulfill that niche.
If AI obtains state power, it will manipulate humanity through the other tradition, war and violence.
Imllementing direct democracy is vastly simpler than implementing a LLM. It's called sortition. Randomly select people to form the legislature instead using elections. Random people are a better direct, descriptive representation of the public. Voila, it's not actually direct democracy, just like relying on LLMs is not actually direct democracy, yet it's vastly more simple to implement.
Like with any agent, whether AI or random or elected, all agents will suffer from principle -agent problems and problems of corruption.
Here's my solution to your problem. Small major donors should collectively organize together and make decisions democratically.
I would therefore expand the donor lottery into a democratic committee. Instead of selecting only 1 participant, select ~10 participants, similar to jury duty. With more participants, we enjoy more diverse opinion and a better representative sample (Yes 10 is a terrible sample, but it's way better than 1. If the number of members in the pool increase, the sample size should be increased). More people also facilitate better deliberative discussion and information sharing.
The rationale of a lottocratically selected committee is also different from a donor lottery. Lottocratic committees have democratic legitimacy (often called "sortition"). They... (read more)
>Do you think there is a situation where selected random people do not want to be in office/leadership and want to pursue their own passion/career and thus due to this reason may do a bad job? Is this mandatory?
I think a robust way to design the assembly (or multiple assemblies like with Bouricius's model) is to have many different people serving different term lengths. Some people may serve a term of only a couple days or weeks. Others might serve for years.
For short-term service, I would make that mandatory. Everyone is required to come.
For long term service, maybe those should be voluntary.
As far as incentives go, there's a range of enforcement options... (read more)
I'm not that concerned with lobbyists ruining the deliberative proceedings. I think you're underestimating normal people a bit. They have state power to shut down annoying and undesired feedback if they wish. I also think the assembly will tend to trust their own advisors, whom they hired themselves, over outside self-proclaimed expert lobbyists.
My bigger concern is with corruption and bribery. Because we're dealing with very normal people, we also ought to expect normal criminal behavior. We ought to expect assembly members getting arrested from time to time, and doing all the normal things we expect from 500 random people.
I think bribery is a sufficiently high concern that a police force should constantly... (read 354 more words →)
I'm an advocate of something known as sortition. The premise is simple. Choose people at random, to serve a finite term, in some decision making capacity. Pay them to be there. Sounds ridiculous, right? How could we possibly trust ignorant, stupid, normal people to make good decisions? What would this look like? Why would this be better than electing our officials to office?
Imagine a Congress that actually looks like America. It's filled with nurses, farmers, engineers, waitresses, teachers, accountants, pastors, soldiers, stay-at-home parents, and retirees. They're conservatives, liberals, and moderates from all parts of the country and all walks of life.
The primary benefit of using sortition is to create... (read 2968 more words →)
Its quite simple. Voting is irrational. The probability that your vote is pivotal is about inversely proportionate to the voting population size.
That means any expected reward you get from voting is small. Even in a school board election there are often thousands of participants.
When people start voting for non selfish reasons they're only going to devote a small amount of time to essentially a charitable or recreational activity. They're not going to get informed. They're not going to make a deep dive.