This is a little nitpicky, but i feel compelled to point out that the brain in the ‘human safety’ example doesn’t have to run for a billion years consecutively. If the goal is to provide consistent moral guidance, the brain can set things up so that it stores a canonical copy of itself in long-term storage, runs for 30 days, then hands off control to another version of itself, loaded from the canonical copy. Every 30 days control is handed to a instance of the canonical version of this person. The same scheme is possible for a group of people.
But this is a nitpick, because i agree that there are probably weird situations in the universe where even the wisest human groups would choose bad outcomes given absolute power for a short time.
This is a little nitpicky, but i feel compelled to point out that the brain in the ‘human safety’ example doesn’t have to run for a billion years consecutively. If the goal is to provide consistent moral guidance, the brain can set things up so that it stores a canonical copy of itself in long-term storage, runs for 30 days, then hands off control to another version of itself, loaded from the canonical copy. Every 30 days control is handed to a instance of the canonical version of this person. The same scheme is possible for a group of people.
But this is a nitpick, because i agree that there are probably weird situations in the universe where even the wisest human groups would choose bad outcomes given absolute power for a short time.