I find it amusing that one of the detailed descriptions of system-wide alignment-preserving governance I know is from Madoka fanfic:
The stated intentions of the structure of the government are three‐fold.
Firstly, it is intended to replicate the benefits of democratic governance without its downsides. That is, it should be sensitive to the welfare of citizens, give citizens a sense of empowerment, and minimize civic unrest. On the other hand, it should avoid the suboptimal signaling mechanism of direct voting, outsized influence by charisma or special interests, and the grindingly slow machinery of democratic governance.
Secondly, it is intended to integrate the interests and power of Artificial Intelligence into Humanity, without creating discord or unduly favoring one or the other. The sentience of AIs is respected, and their enormous power is used to lubricate the wheels of government.
Thirdly, whenever possible, the mechanisms of government are carried out in a human‐interpretable manner, so that interested citizens can always observe a process they understand rather than a set of uninterpretable utility‐optimization problems.
<...>
Formally, Governance is an AI‐mediated Human‐interpretable Abstracted Democracy. It was constructed as an alternative to the Utilitarian AI Technocracy advocated by many of the pre‐Unification ideologues. As such, it is designed to generate results as close as mathematically possible to the Technocracy, but with radically different internal mechanics.
The interests of the government’s constituents, both Human and True Sentient, are assigned to various Representatives, each of whom is programmed or instructed to advocate as strongly as possible for the interests of its particular topic. Interests may be both concrete and abstract, ranging from the easy to understand “Particle Physicists of Mitakihara City” to the relatively abstract “Science and Technology”.
Each Representative can be merged with others—either directly or via advisory AI—to form a super‐Representative with greater generality, which can in turn be merged with others, all the way up to the level of the Directorate. All but the lowest‐level Representatives are composed of many others, and all but the highest form part of several distinct super‐Representatives.
Representatives, assembled into Committees, form the core of nearly all decision‐making. These committees may be permanent, such as the Central Economic Committee, or ad‐hoc, and the assignment of decisions and composition of Committees is handled by special supervisory Committees, under the advisement of specialist advisory AIs. These assignments are made by calculating the marginal utility of a decision inflicted upon the constituents of every given Representative, and the exact process is too involved to discuss here.
At the apex of decision‐making is the Directorate, which is sovereign, and has power limited only by a few Core Rights. The creation—or for Humans, appointment—and retirement of Representatives is handled by the Directorate, advised by MAR, the Machine for Allocation of Representation.
By necessity, VR Committee meetings are held under accelerated time, usually as fast as computational limits permit, and Representatives usually attend more than one at once. This arrangement enables Governance, powered by an estimated thirty‐one percent of Earth’s computing power, to decide and act with startling alacrity. Only at the city level or below is decision‐making handed over to a less complex system, the Bureaucracy, handled by low‐level Sentients, semi‐Sentients, and Government Servants.
The overall point of such a convoluted organizational structure is to maintain, at least theoretically, Human‐interpretability. It ensures that for each and every decision made by the government, an interested citizen can look up and review the virtual committee meeting that made the decision. Meetings are carried out in standard human fashion, with presentations, discussion, arguments, and, occasionally, virtual fistfights. Even with the enormous abstraction and time dilation that is required, this fact is considered highly important, and is a matter of ideology to the government.
<...>
To a past observer, the focus of governmental structure on AI Representatives would seem confusing and even detrimental, considering that nearly 47% are in fact Human. It is a considerable technological challenge to integrate these humans into the day‐to‐day operations of Governance, with its constant overlapping time‐sped committee meetings, requirements for absolute incorruptibility, and need to seamlessly integrate into more general Representatives and subdivide into more specific Representatives.
This challenge has been met and solved, to the degree that the AI‐centric organization of government is no longer considered a problem. Human Representatives are the most heavily enhanced humans alive, with extensive cortical modifications, Permanent Awareness Modules, partial neural backups, and constant connections to the computing grid. Each is paired with an advisory AI in the grid to offload tasks onto, an AI who also monitors the human for signs of corruption or insufficient dedication. Representatives offload memories and secondary cognitive tasks away from their own brains, and can adroitly attend multiple meetings at once while still attending to more human tasks, such as eating.
To address concerns that Human Representatives might become insufficiently Human, each such Representative also undergoes regular checks to ensure fulfillment of the Volokhov Criterion—that is, that they are still functioning, sane humans even without any connections to the network. Representatives that fail this test undergo partial reintegration into their bodies until the Criterion is again met.
I think austerity has a weird relationship with counterfactuals?