Our choice is not between having humans run the world and having a benevolent god run the world.
Right, I agree that having a benevolent god run the world is not within our choice set.
Our choice is between having humans run the world, and having humans delegate the running of the world to something else (which is kind of just an indirect way of running the world).
Well just to re-state the suggestion in my original post: is this dichotomy between humans running the world or something else running the world really so inescapable? The child in the sand pit does not really run the world, and in an important way the parent also does not run the world—certainly not from the perspective of the child’s whole-life trajectory.
I buy into the delegation framing, but I think that the best targets for delegation look more like “slightly older and wiser versions of ourselves with slightly more space” (who can themselves make decisions about whether to delegate to something more alien). In the sand-pit example, if the child opted into that arrangement then I would say they have effectively delegated to a version of themselves who is slightly constrained and shaped by the supervision of the adult. (But in the present situation, the most important thing is that the parent protects them from the outside the world while they have time to grow.)
Right, I agree that having a benevolent god run the world is not within our choice set.
Well just to re-state the suggestion in my original post: is this dichotomy between humans running the world or something else running the world really so inescapable? The child in the sand pit does not really run the world, and in an important way the parent also does not run the world—certainly not from the perspective of the child’s whole-life trajectory.
I buy into the delegation framing, but I think that the best targets for delegation look more like “slightly older and wiser versions of ourselves with slightly more space” (who can themselves make decisions about whether to delegate to something more alien). In the sand-pit example, if the child opted into that arrangement then I would say they have effectively delegated to a version of themselves who is slightly constrained and shaped by the supervision of the adult. (But in the present situation, the most important thing is that the parent protects them from the outside the world while they have time to grow.)