Thanks Tom, yeah the threat model for stage two is quite similar to your post, where I’m expecting one actor to potentially outgrow the rest of the world by grabbing space resources. However, I do think there might be dynamics in space that feed into a first mover advantage, like Fin’s recent post about shutting off space access to other actors, or some way to get to resources first and defend them (not sure about this yet), or just initiating an industrial explosion in space before anyone else (which maybe pays off in the long-term because Earth eventually reaches a limit or slows down in growth compared to Dyson swarm construction).
As for the threat model of stage 1, I don’t have strong opinions on whether a decisive strategic advantage on Earth is more likely to be achieved with superexponential growth or conflict, though your post is very compelling in favour of the former.
My current guess is that there are so many orders of magnitude for growth on Earth that super-exp growth would lead to a decisive strategic advantage without even going to space. If that’s right (which it might not be), then it’s unclear that stage two adds that much.
I’m thinking about this sort of thing at the moment in terms of ~what percentage of worlds a decisive strategic advantage is achieved on Earth vs in space, which informs how important space governance work is. I find the 3 stages of competition model to be useful to figure that out. It’s not clear to me that Earth obviously dominates and I am open to stage 2 actually not mattering very much, but I want to map out strategies here.
Thanks Tom, yeah the threat model for stage two is quite similar to your post, where I’m expecting one actor to potentially outgrow the rest of the world by grabbing space resources. However, I do think there might be dynamics in space that feed into a first mover advantage, like Fin’s recent post about shutting off space access to other actors, or some way to get to resources first and defend them (not sure about this yet), or just initiating an industrial explosion in space before anyone else (which maybe pays off in the long-term because Earth eventually reaches a limit or slows down in growth compared to Dyson swarm construction).
As for the threat model of stage 1, I don’t have strong opinions on whether a decisive strategic advantage on Earth is more likely to be achieved with superexponential growth or conflict, though your post is very compelling in favour of the former.
I’m thinking about this sort of thing at the moment in terms of ~what percentage of worlds a decisive strategic advantage is achieved on Earth vs in space, which informs how important space governance work is. I find the 3 stages of competition model to be useful to figure that out. It’s not clear to me that Earth obviously dominates and I am open to stage 2 actually not mattering very much, but I want to map out strategies here.
I do already think that stage 3 doesn’t matter very much, but I include it as a stage because I may be in a minority view in believing this, e.g. Will and Fin imply that races to other star systems are important in “Preparing for an Intelligence Explosion”, which I think is an opinion based on works by Anders Sandberg and Toby Ord.