(It’s been awhile since I read it, I vaguely recall some in-universe reasons that it worked out with less grabbiness, but they were not reasons I expect to generalize to our world).
IIRC, it was because moving away from the high-bandwidth hive of activity in the Matrioshka brain was never profitable for any individual agent participating in Economy 2.0, since it was running at incredibly high speeds and changing all the time. Exiting it even for a brief period was ~suicidal, and expending resources to send some probe to eat a distant star system was never positive-utility, because by the time the probe reached that star system, the entire economic system will have changed a billion times over. It’s exemplified by the the main characters’ own interstellar expedition.
Basically, the Crab Bucket Ascendant.
Closest quote I’ve found:
Conscious civilizations sooner or later convert all their available mass into computronium, powered by solar output. They don’t go interstellar because they want to stay near the core where the bandwidth is high and latency is low, and sooner or later, competition for resources hatches a new level of metacompetition that obsoletes them.
I also don’t buy it, by the way. Even if all advanced agents in the universe are necessarily myopic, no exceptions, the value from claiming distant resources could be propagated to the present by, like, some kind of chain of financial derivatives.[1]
I. e., a contract C1 whose value depends on the contract C2 that will exist slightly in the future relative to C1, whose value depends on the contract C3 that will exist slightly in the future relative to C2, whose value depends on … the contract Cn, whose value depends on having claim to the distant resource. The “slightly in the future” parameter can then be set as low as necessary to fit within your myopic agent’s “value horizon”.
(Hm, this is another reason “just make the AI myopic” doesn’t help with the alignment problem, isn’t it.)
I remembered that earlier, and during my re-skim when I wrote this post, I got confused by the combo of:
a) he goes out of his way to specify that humans only get to live on around brown dwarves (if the “there’s no value in leaving the economy”, this implies… literally every regular star has aliens?)
b) wormholes exist
c) I think there was a line somewhere about older civilizations that spread farther
And also it just seemed so go damn unreasonable for no one to send out a replicator probe.
And, like, are there literally no pioneers like the Pilgrims/Puritans who are like “well this solar system’s resources are all crowded. I would rather be king of an empire to myself + my friends than live in the slums of this dyson brain?”
(Accelerando spoilers.)
IIRC, it was because moving away from the high-bandwidth hive of activity in the Matrioshka brain was never profitable for any individual agent participating in Economy 2.0, since it was running at incredibly high speeds and changing all the time. Exiting it even for a brief period was ~suicidal, and expending resources to send some probe to eat a distant star system was never positive-utility, because by the time the probe reached that star system, the entire economic system will have changed a billion times over. It’s exemplified by the the main characters’ own interstellar expedition.
Basically, the Crab Bucket Ascendant.
Closest quote I’ve found:
I also don’t buy it, by the way. Even if all advanced agents in the universe are necessarily myopic, no exceptions, the value from claiming distant resources could be propagated to the present by, like, some kind of chain of financial derivatives.[1]
I. e., a contract C1 whose value depends on the contract C2 that will exist slightly in the future relative to C1, whose value depends on the contract C3 that will exist slightly in the future relative to C2, whose value depends on … the contract Cn, whose value depends on having claim to the distant resource. The “slightly in the future” parameter can then be set as low as necessary to fit within your myopic agent’s “value horizon”.
(Hm, this is another reason “just make the AI myopic” doesn’t help with the alignment problem, isn’t it.)
(more spoilers)
I remembered that earlier, and during my re-skim when I wrote this post, I got confused by the combo of:
a) he goes out of his way to specify that humans only get to live on around brown dwarves (if the “there’s no value in leaving the economy”, this implies… literally every regular star has aliens?)
b) wormholes exist
c) I think there was a line somewhere about older civilizations that spread farther
And also it just seemed so go damn unreasonable for no one to send out a replicator probe.
And, like, are there literally no pioneers like the Pilgrims/Puritans who are like “well this solar system’s resources are all crowded. I would rather be king of an empire to myself + my friends than live in the slums of this dyson brain?”