“This is very strange. Consider that if humankind makes it another thousand years, we’ll probably have started to colonize other star systems. Those star systems will colonize other star systems and so on until we start expanding at nearly the speed of light, colonizing literally everything in sight. After a hundred thousand years or so we’ll have settled a big chunk of the galaxy, assuming we haven’t killed ourselves first or encountered someone else already living there.”
There are two assumption here that everybody in the rationalist/EA/AI alignment community seems to take for granted while they seems are least debatable (if not downright false) to me:
1) If we make it to another thousand years, we’ll probably have started to colonize other star systems.
Well, it may turn out it’s a little bit more complicated to go to an other star system than to go to Mars—them being far and so on. Any colony outside of the solar system would necessarily have very limited economic ties with the Earth, since even information would need a few years to be transmitted (good luck managing your Alpha Centauri properties from Earth...) and material goods would be even worse. So the economic interest is not even clear in any non-paperclip maximiser scenario, and that’s assuming galaxy level colonisation is even possible physically (remember that if you are going fast, you will need to slow down, and that the faster you go the heavier you get).
2) “expanding at nearly the speed of light”. This seems downright implausible and ruled out by my understanding of current physic. Light goes fast, you know.
Good news : slate star codex is up again.
Bad news : I’ve been singing “still alive” since this morning and it’s driving me crazy.