ChristianKl's Shortform

ChristianKl

This is a special post for quick takes by ChristianKl. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

In his recent All-In talk Elon Musk talked about how he expects all energy by the sun to be harvested sooner or later by AI. This means building a dyson sphere around the sun. The economic reasoning that forces the building of a dyson sphere is quite straightforward.

While a dyson sphere also complete solves our global warming problem on earth, it also has a good potential to create another extinction event on earth.

I wonder whether this might be a scenario that's more useful to talk about when trying to explain the risk of AGI killing humanity.

A Dyson sphere implies the scale of industry that makes any Earth-scale concerns trivial. If the world didn't care about Earth or its inhabitants, they'd be long gone by the time construction of a Dyson sphere is well underway, as a side effect of the smaller projects that came earlier. Conversely, if there was a sufficient level of care for them to persist in some way until that point, then for the same reasons they persisted previously they'd also persist through construction of a Dyson sphere (even if not on the literal Earth with light from the literal... (read more)

ChristianKl's Shortform

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ChristianKl's Shortform

9