SEARCH IN THE GALAXY

The way I understood the replacement Cleons is that every time a new Cleon is born, it isn't just one Cleon, but two: one that gets to live a normal imperial life, another one that is put in suspended animation and ages at the normal rate, and remains unconscious all the time unless he's needed for an emergency replacement. That's why we see a replacement Brother Dawn and a replacement Brother Day that are the same age as Brother Dawn and Brother Day. I think the emergency replacements are somewhat inferior, because what I've seen so far makes me think that downloading a human brain into an AI isn't a very good copy of the original person. The Hari Seldon AI in episode 8 was having trouble behaving close enough to a normal human being in those circumstances, let alone one that likes Gaal. I don't think that having a somewhat inferior Brother Day is an unsurmountable problem. Brother Dawn, Brother Dusk and Demerzel would compensate for any deficiencies. Demerzel must have been leading the Empire herself after Cleon I died and while Cleon II was only a child. Brother Dawn is afraid of being killed for not being good enough or close enough to the original, and his emergency replacement being woken up to take his place, but we haven't seen Brother Day's or Brother Dusk's opinion on the issue, so it could well be that his fears are unfounded. The question of who has the real power, whether the Emperor of Demerzel, is a good one. In the books, Demerzel has the real power, but she resigns because, as a robot, she reaches a point when she finds it too hard to follow the Laws of Robotics (including the Zeroth Law) in her position of First Minister. I'm not sure I find that reason to give up power particularly convincing. So far, we've only seen the Emperor separated from Demerzel to go on his religious pilgrimage, and that doesn't give us any clues on how capable is the Emperor of running the Empire without Demerzel.

I think you know the answer ... it's all a hokey construct and doesn't take into account that ppl learn, even at the age of 90, despite knowing that they're in their final decade of life. The whole preserved Emperor is about maintaining some sort of ages 40 to 70 optimization strategy so that the thoughts and ideologies of the Emperor of those decades stay constant forever. I would imagine that even Cleon the 1st saw that this was a mediocre idea versus giving him artificial organs, cybernetic implants, and a massive multi-parallel servers, in some super cloud formation, to keep his consciousness going so that he could learn and grow forever. In other words, the present Cleon would in fact be a type of 400 year old man who's seen it all, much like Ito. But of course, this is a "JJ Abrams" type of show and thus, anything goes even if it doesn't make sense.