There is a growing academic field of “governance” that exists that would variously be described as a branch of political science, public administration, or policy studies. It is a relatively small field, but has several academic journals where that fit the description of the literature you’re looking for. The best of these journals, in my opinion, is Perspectives on Public Management & Governance (although it has a focus on public governance structures to a fault of ignoring corporate governance structures).
I have contributed to these questions both from trying to understand what might be the elements of ideal governance structures and processes for Social Insurance programs, AI systems, and Space settlement ideal governance and to understand what are the concerns of integrating autonomous and intelligent decision making systems into our current governance structures and processes.
I think there are some helpful insights into how to make governance adaptive (reset/jubilee as you described it) and for defining the elements of the hierarchy (various levels) of the governance structure. The governance literature looks at micro/meso/macro levels of governance structures to help illustrate how some governance elements are best described and understand at different levels of emergence or description. Another useful construct from governance scholars is that of discretion or breadth of choice set given to an agent carrying out the required decision making of the various governance entities, this is where much of my own interest lies, which you can see in work I have with colleagues on topics including discretion, evolution of bureaucratic form, artificial discretion,administrative evil, and artificial bureaucrats. This work builds on the notion of bounded rational actors and how they execute decisions in response to constitutional rule and insertional structures. Here & here in the AI Governance Handbook, with colleagues we look at how Herbert Simon and Max Weber’s classic answers to these ideal governance questions hold in a world with machine intelligence, and we examine what new governance tools, structures, and processes may be needed now. I’ve also done some very initial work here on the Lesswrong forum looking at how Weber’s ideal bureaucratic structure might be helpful for considering how to control intelligent machine agents
In brief recap, there is a relatively small interdisciplinary field/community of scholars looking at these questions, it is a community that has done some brainstorming, some empirical work, and used some economics-style thinking to address some of these ideal governance questions. There are also some classic works that touch on these topics as well around thinkers such as Max Weber, Herbert Simon, and Elinor Ostrom.
I hope this is helpful. I’m sure I’ve focused too much on my own work here, but I hope the Handbook in particular gives you some sense of some of the work out there. I would be happy to connect you with other writers and thinkers who I believe are taking these questions of ideal governance seriously. I find these to be among the most interesting and important questions for our moment in time.
There is a growing academic field of “governance” that exists that would variously be described as a branch of political science, public administration, or policy studies. It is a relatively small field, but has several academic journals where that fit the description of the literature you’re looking for. The best of these journals, in my opinion, is Perspectives on Public Management & Governance (although it has a focus on public governance structures to a fault of ignoring corporate governance structures).
In addition to this, there is a 50 chapter OUP AI Governance Handbook that I’ve co-edited with leading scholars from Economics, Political Science, International Affairs, and other fields of social science that are interested in these exact ideal governance questions as you describe them. 10 of the chapters are currently available, but I also have complete copies of essentially every chapter that I would be happy to share directly with you or anyone else that comments here and is interested. Here’s the Table of Contents. I’m certainly biased, but I think this book contains the cutting edge dialogue around both how ideal governance may be applied to controlling AI and how the development of increasingly powerful AI presents new opportunities and challenges for ideal governance.
I have contributed to these questions both from trying to understand what might be the elements of ideal governance structures and processes for Social Insurance programs, AI systems, and Space settlement ideal governance and to understand what are the concerns of integrating autonomous and intelligent decision making systems into our current governance structures and processes.
I think there are some helpful insights into how to make governance adaptive (reset/jubilee as you described it) and for defining the elements of the hierarchy (various levels) of the governance structure. The governance literature looks at micro/meso/macro levels of governance structures to help illustrate how some governance elements are best described and understand at different levels of emergence or description. Another useful construct from governance scholars is that of discretion or breadth of choice set given to an agent carrying out the required decision making of the various governance entities, this is where much of my own interest lies, which you can see in work I have with colleagues on topics including discretion, evolution of bureaucratic form, artificial discretion, administrative evil, and artificial bureaucrats. This work builds on the notion of bounded rational actors and how they execute decisions in response to constitutional rule and insertional structures. Here & here in the AI Governance Handbook, with colleagues we look at how Herbert Simon and Max Weber’s classic answers to these ideal governance questions hold in a world with machine intelligence, and we examine what new governance tools, structures, and processes may be needed now. I’ve also done some very initial work here on the Lesswrong forum looking at how Weber’s ideal bureaucratic structure might be helpful for considering how to control intelligent machine agents
In brief recap, there is a relatively small interdisciplinary field/community of scholars looking at these questions, it is a community that has done some brainstorming, some empirical work, and used some economics-style thinking to address some of these ideal governance questions. There are also some classic works that touch on these topics as well around thinkers such as Max Weber, Herbert Simon, and Elinor Ostrom.
I hope this is helpful. I’m sure I’ve focused too much on my own work here, but I hope the Handbook in particular gives you some sense of some of the work out there. I would be happy to connect you with other writers and thinkers who I believe are taking these questions of ideal governance seriously. I find these to be among the most interesting and important questions for our moment in time.