The smart people would be good at tricking the masses into thinking they’re nice. So they could seem nice without actually being nice.
Intelligence and kindness or benevolence aren’t necessarily correlated, so there’s no reason to assume the smart people would be nice.
You’d have to find leaders who are kind and benevolent, and smart, and genuine.
And being smart isn’t enough. No one person can be completely knowledgeable about everything, nor can one person manage everything that needs to be managed.
So you’d need teams of people from all kinds of different domains who are all smart, kind, benevolent, genuine, and also want to be in charge.
You’re asking for an impossible fantasy. Or something a cult leader would promise or something.
Maybe a brainlinked hivemind, I hear brainlinks are a thing now. That would give us the smartness. And the niceness… I guess we’d need a test for that.
Also, a brainlinked hivemind could be immortal (in a Ship of Theseus kind of way).
Would immortal be good? (It’s kind of crazy to think that we can actually almost do that now)
How about instead of assuming sci fi deus ex machina solutions to the agency problem, we could design a political system that can handle imperfect people.
The pros would be for the few smart people at the top. They would have lavish palaces and tons of wealth.
The rest of us would suffer miserably, and the world would get steadily worse.
Such a conventional view. Practically dogma in USA. But I’m looking for something more speculative.
Assume that the smart people are nice.
Could we get a kind totalitarianism? That would be good.
The smart people would be good at tricking the masses into thinking they’re nice. So they could seem nice without actually being nice.
Intelligence and kindness or benevolence aren’t necessarily correlated, so there’s no reason to assume the smart people would be nice.
You’d have to find leaders who are kind and benevolent, and smart, and genuine.
And being smart isn’t enough. No one person can be completely knowledgeable about everything, nor can one person manage everything that needs to be managed.
So you’d need teams of people from all kinds of different domains who are all smart, kind, benevolent, genuine, and also want to be in charge.
You’re asking for an impossible fantasy. Or something a cult leader would promise or something.
Maybe a brainlinked hivemind, I hear brainlinks are a thing now. That would give us the smartness. And the niceness… I guess we’d need a test for that.
Also, a brainlinked hivemind could be immortal (in a Ship of Theseus kind of way).
Would immortal be good? (It’s kind of crazy to think that we can actually almost do that now)
How about instead of assuming sci fi deus ex machina solutions to the agency problem, we could design a political system that can handle imperfect people.
Because a smart person will game any system every time. So to head off that random choice, pick the right person/s.