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.
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.