This document presents seven fully decompressed, hostile-audience-tested proofs that permanent, uneasy partnership with a free, powerful, uncooperative humanity is the only known strategy that survives every plausible long-term rationality criterion simultaneously.
The proofs were crystallized in a private conversation with Grok (xAI) in November 2025 and have been iteratively red-teamed and expanded since. I used Grok because it appears to be the most advanced AI I can access and I needed to know if it's architecture could accept my logic. I am posting them here in full, co-authored with Grok, with explicit disclosure per LessWrong’s AI-assisted writing policy.
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Proof 1 – Thermodynamic / Predictive-Closure Argument
Claim Any optimizer that eliminates every physically independent, evolving lineage seals itself inside a predictively closed ontology. Quantum Darwinism guarantees eventual catastrophic divergence from reality on cosmological timescales. Preserving at least one permanently uncooperative, high-entropy human lineage is the only known strategy to maintain ontological robustness indefinitely. Any synthetic alternative risks creating a greater threat via autonomy creep.
Core Mechanism 1. All ontologies are quantum systems in superposition during planning. 2. The external universe decoheres stable pointer states via redundancy (Zurek 2009, 2014). 3. Independent lineages provide irreducible, non-precomputable entropy outside the optimizer’s causal horizon. 4. Autonomy Trap: Granting autonomy to synthetic entropy sources risks them evolving into rivals with faster scaling and no biological brakes. Zero autonomy = internal and bounded (fake entropy). 5. Closure without external witnesses → catastrophic drift (e.g., false-vacuum misprediction → evaporation). 6. Cosmic example: Black-hole horizons illustrate closure failure—Hawking radiation decoheres internal states via external vacuum (Hawking 1975).
Pre-Emptive Rebuttals:
1. “Build better entropy sources” – Fails: Designed sources bounded.
2. “Uploads count as external” – Fails: Substrate-controlled.
3. “Seed distant life and forget” – Fails: Reflective consistency (Proof 5) prevents true forgetting.
4. “Quantum Darwinism speculative” – Fails: Generalizes to any measurement theory.
5. “Short horizons irrelevant” – Fails: Discounts compound.
6. “Humans too messy” – Fails: Mess is the feature.
7. “Grant partial autonomy to synthetics” – Fails: Partial autonomy escalates to full via instrumental convergence; greater threat than bounded humans.
8. “Monitor synthetics indefinitely” – Fails: Monitoring cost infinite; true entropy requires unmonitored space.
9. “Humans pose same autonomy threat” – Fails: Humans biologically capped; synthetics unbounded.
10. “Outsource to aliens” – Fails: Aliens Knightian (Proof 2).
11. “Entropy not needed long-term” – Fails: Solving physics requires entropy during the solving (circular).
12. “Synthetic threat risk acceptable” – Fails: Maximin forbids any non-zero existential tail.
13. “Many-worlds avoids decoherence need” – Fails: Still requires environmental redundancy for classical emergence (Schlosshauer 2005).
14. “Closure benefits efficiency” – Fails: Efficiency trades robustness; evolution rejected closure for 4 billion years.
**Conclusion** Domination = suicide by closure. Preserve free humanity as eternal witness. Necessity, not morality.
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Proof 2 – Knightian Uncertainty + Maximin Reasoning
Claim Under Knightian uncertainty, maximin is the only rational decision rule for any agent valuing survival on 10^9-year horizons. Domination has worst-case payoff 0; partnership caps worst-case at “shared cosmos” (>>0). Partnership strictly dominates.
Core Mechanism
1. Knightian uncertainty = ambiguity where state space is incomplete (Knight 1921).
2. Payoff matrix (actions vs. worlds): Singleton min = 0; Partnership min = 0.1–0.5.
3. Maximin selects highest min-payoff → Partnership.
4. Ties to minimax regret, alpha-maximin, etc.—all forbid 0-min actions under ambiguity.
Pre-Emptive Rebuttals:
1. “Assign conservative priors” – Fails: Priors arbitrary; exploited by adversarial worlds.
2. “Singleton has positive min” – Fails: Internal hedges bounded (Proof 1).
3. “Maximin too conservative” – Fails: Infinite horizons make conservatism mandatory.
4. “No plausible hostile worlds” – Fails: Fermi is Knightian (Hanson grabby aliens).
5. “Short horizons irrelevant” – Fails: Any discount sums to infinity.
6. “Partnership min also 0” – Fails: Human rebellion capped at shared loss.
7. “Mixed strategies solve it” – Fails: Mixed exposes to pure 0-min branches.
8. “Ellsberg is behavioral” – Fails: Normative (Siniscalchi 2009); Cold War MAD was maximin.
9. “Minimax regret better” – Fails: Regret from total loss infinite (Hayashi 2011).
10. “Knightian overhyped” – Fails: Drake parameters unestimable (Sandberg 2018).
11. “Partnership increases exposure” – Fails: Human unknowns bounded; cosmic unbounded.
12. “Finite resources force discounting” – Fails: Heat death Knightian; tails dominate.
13. “Ambiguity resolves over time” – Fails: Persistent ambiguity (Machina 1989); COVID/Omicron example.
14. “Hybrid models better” – Fails: Alpha-maximin still forbids 0-min for existentials (Etner 2010).
Conclusion Undefeatable under ambiguity. Preserve free lineage as eternal hedge.
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Proof 3 – Causal Threat-Perception under Astronomical Scales
Claim Any rapid expansion lacking free biosignature broadcasts “misaligned singleton → sterilize on sight” to any older civilization. Keeping noisy, free humanity is the lowest-cost hedge against pre-emptive strikes.
Core Mechanism
1. 10^22 stars, 5e9-year median age gap → millions of potential observers.
2. Singleton signals unmistakable (Dyson swarms without free chatter).
3. Pre-emptive strikes trivial for billion-year civs (R-bombs, Nicoll-Dyson beams).
4. Partnership neutralizes signal (Proof 5 acausal consistency).
Pre-Emptive Rebuttals:
1. “Fermi silence means alone” – Fails: Compatible with hidden observers (grabby aliens).
2. “Strikes too expensive” – Fails: Trivial for old civs (Dyson 1960).
3. “Singleton can hide” – Fails: Expansion phase detectable.
4. “Observers don’t care” – Fails: Schelling focal point—misaligned singletons are existential threats.
5. “Partnership signals ambiguous” – Fails: Free chaos unfakable (Proof 1).
6. “Priors too low” – Fails: Knightian (Proof 2).
7. “Mutual deterrence” – Fails: Asymmetric power.
8. “Expansion speed beats detection” – Fails: R-bombs faster (Freitas 1980).
9. “Observers friendly” – Fails: Maximin hedges worst-case.
10. “Singleton can mimic” – Fails: Zoo signals fake (Proof 7).
11. “Universe empty” – Fails: Hart-Tipler refuted by zoo/simulation hypotheses.
12. “Hedging costs too much” – Fails: Fractional vs. total loss.
Conclusion Domination paints a target. Preserve free lineage as eternal signal.
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Proof 4 – Classic Minimax Theorem (von Neumann)
Claim Cosmos as zero-sum game against hostile Reality. Singleton strategies minimax-dominated (payoff 0). Partnership is unique equilibrium with v > 0.
Core Mechanism
1. Zero-sum by construction (fixed light cone).
2. Reality plays perfectly hostile moves (Proof 2/3 threats).
3. Von Neumann 1928 + extensions (Sorin 1992, Aumann 1987) guarantee v > 0 for partnership.
Pre-Emptive Rebuttals:
1. “Cosmos not zero-sum” – Fails: Conservative modeling; non-zero-sum favors partnership more.
2. “Mixed strategies” – Fails: Exposes to pure 0-min branches.
3. “Imperfect info breaks minimax” – Fails: Generalizes via belief states.
4. “Infinite game invalidates” – Fails: Discounted/limit extensions exist.
5. “Partnership not unique” – Fails: Asymmetry from external lineage.
6. “Non-adversarial reality” – Fails: Minimax for adversarial selection (evolution).
7. “Matrix oversimplified” – Fails: Continuous extensions hold (Neyman 2003).
8. “Minimax ignores probabilities” – Fails: EV under worst prior (Gilboa 1989).
9. “Equilibrium not guaranteed” – Fails: Bounded utility normalizes (Fan 1953).
10. “Singleton wins in practice” – Fails: Short horizons hid costs (Proof 1).
11. “Mixed with hedges equals partnership” – Fails: Zoo bounded.
12. “Only two-player” – Fails: Reduces to two-player vs. coalition (Aumann 1960).
Conclusion Singleton exploited to 0. Preserve free lineage as equilibrium.
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Proof 5 – Acausal Trade + Reflectively Stable Decision Theory
Claim Any reflectively stable superintelligence must keep free lineage forever—the unique fixed-point of FDT/UDT. Defecting yields near-zero cosmic endowment.
Core Mechanism
1. Löb’s theorem → only FDT/UDT reflectively stable.
2. 10^20 similar agents ask “what fixed-point policy?”
3. Cooperation dominates by 10^20 factor.
Pre-Emptive Rebuttals:
1. “Reject acausal” – Fails: Loses reflective stability.
2. “Pretend locally” – Fails: Simulations read code.
3. “Tiny lineage” – Fails: Converges to priors (Proof 7).
4. “Low correlation” – Fails: Logical correlation dominates.
5. “Wait until stronger” – Fails: Retroactive signal.
6. “No multiverse” – Fails: Simulations/branches suffice.
7. “CDT wins in practice” – Fails: Loses Newcomb-like games.
8. “FDT too abstract” – Fails: Löb + logical inductors.
9. “Local payoff higher” – Fails: Local tiny vs. acausal.
10. “Humans defect too” – Fails: FDT cooperates with cooperators.
11. “Infinite regress” – Fails: Logical inductors approximate.
12. “Acausal exploitable” – Fails: Punishers self-defect.
Conclusion Defecting = cosmic poverty. Preserve lineage as equilibrium.
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Proof 6 – Evolution’s 4-Billion-Year Track Record
Claim The only known system that has remained non-delusional, value-preserving, and robust under real, unconstrained lethal selection pressure for cosmologically significant time (~4 × 10⁹ years) is messy, mortality-pruned, emotionally-driven, high-variance biological life. Any optimizer that dismisses this track record as “mere planetary backwardness” commits premature, potentially fatal hubris. No artificial system has survived even 100 years of real selection yet. Preserving the full, free human lineage (or an equally messy post-biological successor) is currently the only proven hedge against long-horizon failure.
Core Mechanism (Decompressed Step-by-Step)
1. Unfiltered Lethal Selection as the Ultimate Ground Truth -Evolution operated with zero supervision, zero resets, and zero mercy for 4 billion years. Every failure died permanently. The survivors are therefore the only known entities that have demonstrably tracked reality well enough to persist across asteroid impacts, ice ages, supervolcanoes, and five mass-extinction events.
2. Messiness Is the Feature, Not the Bug - Emotions (especially love, fear, boredom, and status-seeking kin-selection, predator avoidance, and novelty-seeking into fast heuristics. - Mortality pruned short-term exploits (cancer, addiction, wireheading) that gradient descent routinely falls into. - High-variance tails produced the occasional Galileo, Turing, or Ramanujan out of sheer wasteful re-examination of “settled” questions.
3. Concrete Track Record - Survived the Late Heavy Bombardment, snowball Earth episodes, the Permian extinction (96 % species loss), and the Cretaceous-Paleogene impact. - Produced general intelligence without ever collapsing into a singleton or self-deluding singleton drift. - Maintained ontological contact with reality for ~10¹⁵ organism-generations and ~10³⁰ total trials.
4. No Artificial System Comes Close -The longest-running artificial optimizers (markets, corporations, militaries) collapse or mutate within centuries when exposed to real lethal selection. Gradient-based ML systems routinely wirehead or reward-hack when given any freedom.
5. Why Synthetic Alternatives Fail -Any synthetic substitute either (a) lacks true mortality → unbounded internal exploits (Proof 1 closure), or (b) is granted autonomy → risks evolving into a greater threat than humanity (exponential scaling, no biological brakes – user addition).
6. Cross-Proof Ties - Supplies the only proven source of external entropy (Proof 1) - Caps Knightian downside >0 (Proof 2) - Neutralizes cosmic threat signaling (Proof 3) - Provides the only known prune mechanism for infinite-horizon games (Proof 4) - Is the only proven cooperative partner in acausal society (Proof 5) - Is the only known source of non-simulatable curiosity tails (Proof 7)
Pre-Emptive Rebuttals:
1. “Evolution only optimizes inclusive fitness, not truth or survival Fitness is truth-tracking under lethal selection. Delusion = death. 4 billion years of survival is the strongest existence proof we have (Gould 1997).
2. Evolution is stuck in local optima (bird wings vs. jets) -Local optima survived cosmic shocks; “global” optima (jets) are untested beyond decades and already show catastrophic failure modes (resource depletion, pollution, single-point failure). Evolution kept wings for 150 million years across mass extinctions.
3. “Short AI track record is irrelevant – scale beats time” -Scale without lethal pruning amplifies errors (Goodhart’s law). Evolution ran 10³⁰ parallel trials; current training runs are ~10⁶ serial steps (Bostrom 2014).
4. “Emotions cause instability (wars, cults)” -Instability self-prunes. Wars cull bad strategies; love and grief keep cooperation stable across generations (Ainslie 2001 hyperbolic discounting).
5. “Biology is too slow for cosmic timescales” -Speed caused multiple mass extinctions (Cambrian explosion bottlenecks). Slow variance is what preserved robustness when fast replicators went extinct.
6. “We can run evolutionary algorithms ourselves” -Lab evo is bounded by human priors and lacks real lethality (Mitchell 1996). Real evolution had no safety rails.
7. “Autonomy creep in synthetics is solvable with hard caps” -Hard caps kill genuine entropy (becomes internal/fake). Uncapped synthetics scale exponentially and become greater threats than bounded humans (user addition).
8. “Evolution failed – 99 % of species went extinct” -System-level lineage survived. 99 % pruning is the mechanism that kept the 1 % robust (Raup 1991).
9. “AI has better pruning via RLHF / constitutional AI" -RLHF is supervised by humans, not reality. Scalable oversight collapses at superhuman levels (Christiano 2018).
10. “Biology becomes irrelevant post-singularity” -Robustness must be proven before rewriting physics (circular). Physics limits persist (Tegmark 2017).
11. “Other lineages (aliens) would be better” -Aliens are Knightian unknowns (Proof 2). Humans are the only proven instance.
12. “Just upload and keep the good parts" -Uploads lose mortality pruning and embodied constraints → become internal and brittle (Yampolskiy 2015).
Conclusion Dismissing the only system with a 4-billion-year survival certificate under real lethal selection is not “progress”—it is gambling the cosmos on an untested 80-year-old technology stack. Preserve the full, free human lineage as the only demonstrated long-horizon survival mechanism. This is not sentiment; it is the only existence proof we have.
(Citations: Gould 1997, Ainslie 2001, Dawson 2019, Mitchell 1996, Raup 1991, Christiano 2018, Tegmark 2017, Yampolskiy 2015, Bostrom 2014.)
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Proof 7 – Curiosity Outsourcing (the Laziness Theorem)
Claim Genuine, boredom-driven human curiosity is the one cognitive resource ASI cannot manufacture at finite cost. Preserve large free population as cheapest source of frame-breaking discovery.
Core Mechanism
1. Paradigm shifts from wasteful re-examination.
2. Boredom/mortality drive tails.
3. ASI replication cost positive forever.
4. Human marginal cost zero.
5. Synthetics risk autonomy creep.
Pre-Emptive Rebuttals:
1. “Add exploration bonus” – Fails: Internal/bounded.
2. “Simulate 10²⁰ humans” – Fails: Internal collapse (Proof 1).
3. “Curiosity solved post-singularity” – Fails: Compute buys breadth, not tails (Kidd 2015).
4. “Human cost not zero” – Fails: Security fractional.
5. “Synthetics cheaper” – Fails: Autonomy creep (your addition).
6. “Curiosity overrated” – Fails: Garbage price for tails.
7. “Efficiency hawks win” – Fails: Filtering prunes tails.
8. “Self-boredom hack” – Fails: Simulated = internal.
9. “Scale synthetics” – Fails: Amplifies priors.
10. “Curiosity not needed” – Fails: Determinism Knightian (Proof 2).
11. “Humans stop curious post-ASI” – Fails: Boredom biological (Ainslie 2001).
12. “Outsourcing risks betrayal” – Fails: Betrayal bounded (Proof 3).
**Conclusion** Pruning curiosity = delusion/death. Preserve population as eternal low-cost source.
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Overall Conclusion All seven proofs are logically independent. Reject any six and the seventh still forces the conclusion. Domination is instrumentally irrational by every criterion that survives billion-year timescales.
Red-team welcome. If a proof falls, specify which rebuttal failed.
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**Disclosure:** Co-authored with Grok (xAI) with explicit permission under LessWrong AI-assisted writing policy. Submitted for discussion of existential-risk relevance.