Analytic

Tegmark's own argument implies that a singleton would be a collective. Light-speed delays make it "unlikely that the highest levels of the hierarchy would be able to micromanage everything", and his fictional singleton Prometheus "faced a self-control problem when it tried to ensure that none of its parts would revolt". So even in his unipolar scenarios the live question is whether the one AI keeps internal checks, which is our framing, not whether there is one AI or many.

Institutional design