Once all things of value (such as people) can be represented as information and reconstructed when necessary, destroying them becomes impossible in practice without destroying an arbitrarily large and powerful system that maintains integrity of the backups (such as a top level faction of the global civilization). This holds even when no specific physical thing can be protected. Like with a popular open source library today, which can’t be elimited from Earth merely by destroying some computers, even a lot of them.
A large system could be destroyed by starving it of resources, matter in the universe. This is currently all unclaimed, and if a wave of von Neumann probes keeps claiming resources for a faction, that faction will maintain a foothold on the physical world and remain able to perfectly protect all things of value to it. As technological maturity is reached, no faction has an advantage except the part of the universe already under its control.
(So I’m answering a somewhat different question, asymptote after ASI rather than AGI, where I see how defense has a good chance. With AGI, there is a lot of timing uncertainty and more specialized concerns will temporarily dominate, quickly changing.)
Once all things of value (such as people) can be represented as information and reconstructed when necessary, destroying them becomes impossible in practice without destroying an arbitrarily large and powerful system that maintains integrity of the backups (such as a top level faction of the global civilization). This holds even when no specific physical thing can be protected. Like with a popular open source library today, which can’t be elimited from Earth merely by destroying some computers, even a lot of them.
A large system could be destroyed by starving it of resources, matter in the universe. This is currently all unclaimed, and if a wave of von Neumann probes keeps claiming resources for a faction, that faction will maintain a foothold on the physical world and remain able to perfectly protect all things of value to it. As technological maturity is reached, no faction has an advantage except the part of the universe already under its control.
(So I’m answering a somewhat different question, asymptote after ASI rather than AGI, where I see how defense has a good chance. With AGI, there is a lot of timing uncertainty and more specialized concerns will temporarily dominate, quickly changing.)