Jordan Stone

• Jordan Stone 20 Jan 2026 16:34 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Nikola Jurkovic’s comment on: nikola’s Shortform

  The thing that worries me in this scenario is that Superpower A has the ability to expand to other star systems while Superpower B (and presumably everyone else on Earth) has very little say about it.

  I don’t think Superpower B would be able to convincingly argue that they are willing to initiate their own destruction through MAD if they’re not given access to half of the galaxy or if their preferences for large scale space expansion are not taken into account. Also, assuming the leaders of superpower B don’t want to be deposed, they wouldn’t make such a threat anyway because it wouldn’t be in the interest of the people that the leaders of Superpower B represent.

  I think interstellar travel will be a really pivotal point with a huge risk of locking in bad values for the long-term future. There is a selection bias: the actor most likely to gain dominance in space is not the actor most likely to have good values, so space power grabs risks locking in bad values for the long-term future.

• Jordan Stone 13 Jan 2026 16:10 UTC

  2 points

  1

  on: Space coloniza­tion and sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery could be manda­tory for suc­cess­ful defen­sive AI

  I’ve always thought of space infrastructure (including weaponry) to be very difficult to defend. Like satellites are very easily destroyed by even tiny pieces of debris. I think this would also be true for a megastructure in space, especially if it was a thin very wide diameter object focusing a laser. A defensive ASI on Earth might be able to fire a projectile at the megastructure and cause a massive structural collapse for a relatively cheap cost compared to the energy and materials to build the giant space laser?

  So my intuition would be that conflicts between ASIs on Earth and in space would be in favour of the Earth-based ASI until relative power dynamics come into play later on.. the limit on energy generation on Earth seems orders of magnitude lower than what is possible with a Dyson swarm.

• Jordan Stone 26 Jun 2025 11:09 UTC

  1 point

  2

  in reply to: ProgramCrafter’s comment on: In­ter­stel­lar travel will prob­a­bly doom the long-term future

  Yeah there are definitely a lot of footnotes—the post was originally a lot longer but I ended up focusing in on the galactic-scale stuff.

  I think it’s okay that they don’t quite line up—it’s clear what’s happened and people can still access that extra info if they want to read it.

• Jordan Stone 25 Jun 2025 20:04 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Vladimir_Nesov’s comment on: In­ter­stel­lar travel will prob­a­bly doom the long-term future

  By the time there is an interstellar civilization, humanity would almost certainly already have caused a superintelligence to be created

  This is definitely correct, but I think this scenario hops over the decision-point that I’m referring to (or, the point at which the governance system I describe becomes necessary). It isn’t the time of the creation of interstellar civilisation that I care about, but the point at which interstellar civilisation becomes inevitable. This may be the first interstellar colonisation mission, which begins a self-propagating expansion of human civilisation throughout the galaxy. If that propagation begins without an extremely forward-thinking governance system embedded within it (seemingly superintelligent), then the eventual creation of a galactic x-risk seems inevitable.

  I think it’s very plausible that superintelligence comes after the first interstellar mission. One reason is that transformative AI, initiating explosive technological growth, would presumably come before superintelligence. So we would probably gain the ability to send an interstellar colonisation mission at that point before the development of superintelligence.

  To be fair, we would almost certainly be able to catch up with an interstellar colonisation mission post-superintelligence, which might follow it quite quickly. Though, I’m not sure if this is the best way to go about ensuring long-term existential security, as they may be resistant to being governed by an AI. So I would prefer to play it safe and avoid interstellar travel completely until the problems I outlined are solved—that’s more of a personal preference than a strong opinion though.

  And any external dangers likely can’t have a meaningful technological advantage, since all technologically mature civilizations have a similar level of knowledge about the physical world and ability to produce any relevant physical technology.

  I’m not sure if I understand this. Are you saying that if an external civilisation (i.e., alien civilisation) initiates a galactic x-risk, then another civilisation governed by a superintelligent AI would be able to protect itself because it would have similarly mature technology? I’m not sure if there is anything we could do to defend ourselves if an alien civilization initiated vacuum decay.

  Also, distributed backups make any local physical damage somewhat ephemeral, as long as the rest of the universe under the same governance (expanding with colonization) has enough matter to work with, to restore anything of value that got its original physical substrate taken away.

  Yeah, definitely. All of the galactic x-risks I listed though are either self-propagating or infinite in range, except maybe societal collapse or loss of value scenarios.
  

• Jordan Stone 25 Jun 2025 15:36 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: In­ter­stel­lar travel will prob­a­bly doom the long-term future

  Crossposted to the EA Forum: https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​x7YXxDAwqAQJckdkr/​​interstellar-travel-will-probably-doom-the-long-term-future

In­ter­stel­lar travel will prob­a­bly doom the long-term future

• Jordan Stone 14 Jan 2025 19:35 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Peter Jin’s comment on: An ex­haus­tive list of cos­mic threats

  Thanks Peter. I’ll add another category for that like I did with asteroid impacts.