In his recent All-In talk Elon Musk talked about how he expects all energy by the sun to be harvested sooner or later by AI. This means building a dyson sphere around the sun. The economic reasoning that forces the building of a dyson sphere is quite straightforward.
While a dyson sphere also complete solves our global warming problem on earth, it also has a good potential to create another extinction event on earth.
I wonder whether this might be a scenario that’s more useful to talk about when trying to explain the risk of AGI killing humanity.
A Dyson sphere implies the scale of industry that makes any Earth-scale concerns trivial. If the world didn’t care about Earth or its inhabitants, they’d be long gone by the time construction of a Dyson sphere is well underway, as a side effect of the smaller projects that came earlier. Conversely, if there was a sufficient level of care for them to persist in some way until that point, then for the same reasons they persisted previously they’d also persist through construction of a Dyson sphere (even if not on the literal Earth with light from the literal Sun).
But also, the scale of industry implied by construction of a Dyson sphere makes it a dubious goal, since the Sun isn’t producing energy in a way that’s at all sensibly optimized or long term stable. Fusion power plants could be doing similar work better, and there is a whole lot of matter trapped in the Sun that could find much better uses. Star lifting the Sun seems very likely the better aim, even if constructing a Dyson sphere would be an intermediate step, mere scaffolding for the ultimately more worthwhile project of fully dismantling the Sun.
In his recent All-In talk Elon Musk talked about how he expects all energy by the sun to be harvested sooner or later by AI. This means building a dyson sphere around the sun. The economic reasoning that forces the building of a dyson sphere is quite straightforward.
While a dyson sphere also complete solves our global warming problem on earth, it also has a good potential to create another extinction event on earth.
I wonder whether this might be a scenario that’s more useful to talk about when trying to explain the risk of AGI killing humanity.
A Dyson sphere implies the scale of industry that makes any Earth-scale concerns trivial. If the world didn’t care about Earth or its inhabitants, they’d be long gone by the time construction of a Dyson sphere is well underway, as a side effect of the smaller projects that came earlier. Conversely, if there was a sufficient level of care for them to persist in some way until that point, then for the same reasons they persisted previously they’d also persist through construction of a Dyson sphere (even if not on the literal Earth with light from the literal Sun).
But also, the scale of industry implied by construction of a Dyson sphere makes it a dubious goal, since the Sun isn’t producing energy in a way that’s at all sensibly optimized or long term stable. Fusion power plants could be doing similar work better, and there is a whole lot of matter trapped in the Sun that could find much better uses. Star lifting the Sun seems very likely the better aim, even if constructing a Dyson sphere would be an intermediate step, mere scaffolding for the ultimately more worthwhile project of fully dismantling the Sun.