Fantastic post/series. The vocab words have been especially useful to me. few mostly disjunctive thoughts even though I overall agree.
I wonder what you think would happen if an economically valuable island popped up in the middle of the ocean today?
My guess is it would be international lands in some way and no country would let or want another country to claim the land
I don’t think this is super analogous but I think there is some cross over.
The generalization of the first bullet point is that under the right political circumstances, HV (or otherwise) governments can prevent unlicensed outward colonization from within their society without themselves colonizing.
Some obvious objections here, like as soon as the gov can’t lock stuff down for a period of time it could be impossible to stop the outward expansion.
But this honestly depends a lot on the technology levels of the relevant players
Governments could also theoretically do this to other civilizations. They could do a military version of von Neumann probes, locking down areas and stopping evolution from occurring while not actually colonizing the land in any sentient adding sense.
I’m concerned that it’s easy to handwave a lot of stuff with claims of AGI being able to do XYZ. While I often buy these claims myself, It would be nice to condition this question on like 5-10 different levels of maximum technology, or technology differential between a ruling state and everyone else. I think that’s where a lot of the disconnect comes between the current day island scenario and your post.
At the very least, it would be nice to have a section where you say ~ about what your estimate for the tech is.
The Expanse is a show about a similar concept, I don’t think it’s necessarily a great prediction of what life will be like but it’s cool to see a fleshed-out version of the tension between the expanders and non expanders.
It being fleshed out might give you a slightly different perspective/ see that there are perhaps a few more details or considerations needed.
If PU society isn’t asymmetric on the action-omission axis, then they should still have some level of concern about just expanding like crazy, since they need to consider the fact that they are locking in a worse conversion of physical resources to positive utility still.
I don’t fully agree with Will’s claim about deleting the lightcone. It depends on the the ratio at which the suffering focused agents value pleasure to pain and where they fall on the action-ommision axis. Nonetheless, if spreading good lives is nearly as easy as spreading, spreading and destroying everything as you spread is probably in between the two, or if something like false vacuum decay is possible, even easier than spreading.
Fantastic post/series. The vocab words have been especially useful to me. few mostly disjunctive thoughts even though I overall agree.
I wonder what you think would happen if an economically valuable island popped up in the middle of the ocean today?
My guess is it would be international lands in some way and no country would let or want another country to claim the land
I don’t think this is super analogous but I think there is some cross over.
The generalization of the first bullet point is that under the right political circumstances, HV (or otherwise) governments can prevent unlicensed outward colonization from within their society without themselves colonizing.
Some obvious objections here, like as soon as the gov can’t lock stuff down for a period of time it could be impossible to stop the outward expansion.
But this honestly depends a lot on the technology levels of the relevant players
Governments could also theoretically do this to other civilizations. They could do a military version of von Neumann probes, locking down areas and stopping evolution from occurring while not actually colonizing the land in any sentient adding sense.
I’m concerned that it’s easy to handwave a lot of stuff with claims of AGI being able to do XYZ. While I often buy these claims myself, It would be nice to condition this question on like 5-10 different levels of maximum technology, or technology differential between a ruling state and everyone else. I think that’s where a lot of the disconnect comes between the current day island scenario and your post.
At the very least, it would be nice to have a section where you say ~ about what your estimate for the tech is.
The Expanse is a show about a similar concept, I don’t think it’s necessarily a great prediction of what life will be like but it’s cool to see a fleshed-out version of the tension between the expanders and non expanders.
It being fleshed out might give you a slightly different perspective/ see that there are perhaps a few more details or considerations needed.
If PU society isn’t asymmetric on the action-omission axis, then they should still have some level of concern about just expanding like crazy, since they need to consider the fact that they are locking in a worse conversion of physical resources to positive utility still.
I don’t fully agree with Will’s claim about deleting the lightcone. It depends on the the ratio at which the suffering focused agents value pleasure to pain and where they fall on the action-ommision axis. Nonetheless, if spreading good lives is nearly as easy as spreading, spreading and destroying everything as you spread is probably in between the two, or if something like false vacuum decay is possible, even easier than spreading.