Thanks! So far as I know, you’re right about interstellar travel. But suppose we got a good bit of dispersal within the solar system, say, ten settlements. There seems a reasonable chance that at least some would deliberately break off communication with the rest of the solar system and develop effective means of policing this. They would then—so far as I can tell—be immune to existential risks transmitted by information—e.g., misaligned AI.
It’s true that they could still be vulnerable to physical attack, such as a killer probe, but how likely is this? It’s conceivable that either human actors or misaligned ASI could decide to wipe out or conquer hermit settlements elsewhere in the solar system, but that strikes me as rather improbable. They’d have to have a strange set of motives.
It might also be hard to do. Since the aggressor would have to project power across a huge distance, so long as the potential victims had means of detecting a probe or some other attack, we might expect the offence-defence balance to favour the defence. (This wouldn’t be true, however, if the reason the settlements had ‘gone off the grid’ was that they had returned to pre-modern conditions, either by choice or by catastrophe.)
I think any AI that is capable of wiping out humanity on earth is likely to be capable of wiping them out on all the planets in our solar system. Earth is far more habitable than those other planets, so they would be correspondingly fragile and easier to take out. I don’t think the distance would be much of an advantage, a current day spaceship only takes 10 years to get to pluto so the playing field is not very far.
I think your point about motivation is important, but it also applies within Earth. Why would an AI bother to kill off isolated sentinlese islanders? A lot of the answers to that question (like it needs to turn all available resources into computing power) could also motivate it to attack an isolated pluto colony. So if you do accept that AI is an existential threat on one planet, space settlement might not reduce it by very much on the motivation front.
Thanks! So far as I know, you’re right about interstellar travel. But suppose we got a good bit of dispersal within the solar system, say, ten settlements. There seems a reasonable chance that at least some would deliberately break off communication with the rest of the solar system and develop effective means of policing this. They would then—so far as I can tell—be immune to existential risks transmitted by information—e.g., misaligned AI.
It’s true that they could still be vulnerable to physical attack, such as a killer probe, but how likely is this? It’s conceivable that either human actors or misaligned ASI could decide to wipe out or conquer hermit settlements elsewhere in the solar system, but that strikes me as rather improbable. They’d have to have a strange set of motives.
It might also be hard to do. Since the aggressor would have to project power across a huge distance, so long as the potential victims had means of detecting a probe or some other attack, we might expect the offence-defence balance to favour the defence. (This wouldn’t be true, however, if the reason the settlements had ‘gone off the grid’ was that they had returned to pre-modern conditions, either by choice or by catastrophe.)
I think any AI that is capable of wiping out humanity on earth is likely to be capable of wiping them out on all the planets in our solar system. Earth is far more habitable than those other planets, so they would be correspondingly fragile and easier to take out. I don’t think the distance would be much of an advantage, a current day spaceship only takes 10 years to get to pluto so the playing field is not very far.
I think your point about motivation is important, but it also applies within Earth. Why would an AI bother to kill off isolated sentinlese islanders? A lot of the answers to that question (like it needs to turn all available resources into computing power) could also motivate it to attack an isolated pluto colony. So if you do accept that AI is an existential threat on one planet, space settlement might not reduce it by very much on the motivation front.