I disagree that every indirect normativity process must approximate this linear process of humans delegating to the future. In the ELK appendix, there is some discussion of a process that allows humans to delegate to the past so as to form a self-consistent chain:
Sometimes the delegate Hn will want to delegate to a future version of themselves, but they will realize that the situation they are in is actually not very good (for example, the AI may have no way to get them food for the night), and so they would actually prefer that the AI had made a different decision at some point in the past. We want our AI to take actions now that will help keep us safe in the future, so it’s important to use this kind of data to guide the AI’s behavior. But doing so introduces significant complexities, related to the issues discussed in Appendix: subtle manipulation.
I disagree that every indirect normativity process must approximate this linear process of humans delegating to the future. In the ELK appendix, there is some discussion of a process that allows humans to delegate to the past so as to form a self-consistent chain:
Mark would probably have more to say here.