Why would an AI think royal families are inefficient?
Because a pure optimizer scores systems on measurable outcomes, and hereditary status assigns power and budget by birth order rather than performance. That looks like a resourcing bug: capital allocated to an untested variable instead of the candidate pool most likely to produce results, which is the core failure mode this thought experiment explores.
Answered in
Why AI Would Delete Royal Families, and What It Would Build InsteadA thought experiment: how a pure optimizer would score hereditary monarchy as a bug, and the meritocratic council it would ship instead.
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