What I had in mind was some sort of combinatorial approach to designing chips

Oh, okay, fair enough, though I'm still not sure I would call that an "expert system" (this time for the opposite reason that it seems too stupid).

many aspects of the legal and political systems could be reformed, and it's not difficult to come up with ideas on how they could be reformed. The benefit is simply insufficient to justify spending much of the limited resources we have on solving those problems.

Ah. I was thinking of designing an AI, probably because I was primed by your expert system comment. Well, in those cases, I think the issue is that our legal and political systems were purposely set up to be difficult to change: change requires overturning precedents, obtaining majority or 3/5 or 2/3 votes in various legislative bodies, passing constitutional amendments, and so forth. And I can guarantee you that for any of these reforms, there are powerful interests who would be harmed by the reforms, and many people who don't want reform: this is more of a persuasion problem than an infrastructure problem. But yes, you're right that there are plenty of revolutionary ideas about how to reform, say, the education system: they're just not widely accepted enough to happen.

So you think there's a >10% chance that the world's problems are going to destroy humanity in the near future?

I'm confused by this sentence. I'm not sure if I think that, but what does it have to do with the hypothetical button that has a 10% chance of destroying humanity? My point was that it's worth taking a small risk of destroying humanity if the benefits are great enough.