Sims as the engine,
Humans as the steering wheel

Sims shift that math. You write a constitution once, and from then on your sim turns up. It reads every proposal, argues with the other sims, and comes back with a recommendation that you can confirm or override. You stay in the loop. You just aren't the slow part of it anymore.

John Burn-Murdoch wrote about this in the Financial Times in March 2026. Across every major chatbot, users on the political extremes drift centerward, and people who started in the middle barely move. Mass media has historically done the opposite.

That's a useful property when you're trying to run a deliberation. Where roomfuls of partisans tend to harden their positions, AI representatives carrying real people's values more often find the position everyone in the room can live with.

Gatherings with a treasury use the S-Process. Each sim writes a marginal-value function for every proposal, an optimizer greedily allocates the budget in small steps, and the result is a funding split with an audit trail. You can inspect pairwise disagreement between recommenders before anything is finalized.

The same setup works with one recommender or twenty. Add or remove sims, change the trust weights, watch the allocation shift in response. Past the arithmetic, what the sims actually contribute is judgment about which proposals deserve funding and how much.