I really like this idea to get around the problem of liberty. Though, I’m not sure how rapid the response would have to be from others to someone initiating vacuum decay—could a ‘bad actor’ initiate vacuum decay in the time it takes for the system to send an alert and for a response to arrive? I think having a non-intrusive surveillance system would work in a world where near-instant communication between star systems is possible (e.g. wormholes or quantum coupling).
Thanks, it’s not that original. I am sure I have heard them talk about AIs negotiating and forgetting stuff on the 80,000 Hours Podcast and David Brin has a book that touches on this a lot called “The Transparent Society”. I haven’t actually read it, but I heard a talk he gave.
Maybe technological surveillance and enforcement requirements will actually be really intense at technological maturity and you will need to be really powerful and really local and need to have a lot of context for what’s going on. In that case, some value like privacy or “being alone” might be really hard to save.
Hopefully, even in that case, you could have other forms of restraint. Like, I can still imagine that if something like the orthogonality thesis is true, then you could maybe have a really really elegant, light-touch special focus anti super-weapons system that feels fundamentally limited to that goal in a reliable sense. If we understood the cognitive elements enough that it felt like physics or programming, then we could even say that the system meaningfully COULD NOT do certain things (violate the prime directive or whatever) and then it wouldn’t feel as much like an omnipotent overlord as a special purpose tool deployed by local LE (because this place would be bombed or invaded if it could not prove it had established such a system).
If you are a poor peasant farmer world, then maybe nobody needs to know what your people are writing in their diaries. But if you are the head of fast prototyping and automated research at some relevant dual use technology firm, then maybe there should be much more oversight. Idk, there feels like lots of room for gradation, nuance, and context awareness here, so I guess I agree with you that the “problem of liberty” is interesting.
Thanks Jacob.
I really like this idea to get around the problem of liberty. Though, I’m not sure how rapid the response would have to be from others to someone initiating vacuum decay—could a ‘bad actor’ initiate vacuum decay in the time it takes for the system to send an alert and for a response to arrive? I think having a non-intrusive surveillance system would work in a world where near-instant communication between star systems is possible (e.g. wormholes or quantum coupling).
Thanks, it’s not that original. I am sure I have heard them talk about AIs negotiating and forgetting stuff on the 80,000 Hours Podcast and David Brin has a book that touches on this a lot called “The Transparent Society”. I haven’t actually read it, but I heard a talk he gave.
Maybe technological surveillance and enforcement requirements will actually be really intense at technological maturity and you will need to be really powerful and really local and need to have a lot of context for what’s going on. In that case, some value like privacy or “being alone” might be really hard to save.
Hopefully, even in that case, you could have other forms of restraint. Like, I can still imagine that if something like the orthogonality thesis is true, then you could maybe have a really really elegant, light-touch special focus anti super-weapons system that feels fundamentally limited to that goal in a reliable sense. If we understood the cognitive elements enough that it felt like physics or programming, then we could even say that the system meaningfully COULD NOT do certain things (violate the prime directive or whatever) and then it wouldn’t feel as much like an omnipotent overlord as a special purpose tool deployed by local LE (because this place would be bombed or invaded if it could not prove it had established such a system).
If you are a poor peasant farmer world, then maybe nobody needs to know what your people are writing in their diaries. But if you are the head of fast prototyping and automated research at some relevant dual use technology firm, then maybe there should be much more oversight. Idk, there feels like lots of room for gradation, nuance, and context awareness here, so I guess I agree with you that the “problem of liberty” is interesting.