If this is satire, there are funnier options. The ownership is determined either by consensus or by the right of the strong if there is no consensus.
Vladlen Bakhnov
HOW THE SUN WENT OUT, or THE STORY OF THE THOUSAND-YEAR DICTATORSHIP OF WOWOLANDIA, WHICH LASTED 13 YEARS, 5 MONTHS, AND 7 DAYS
The historical events, truthfully and objectively set forth in this chronicle, took place on a far, faraway planet called Anomaly, slowly revolving around the star Oh.
However, while for us Earthlings Oh is merely a tenth-magnitude star, one of many, for the inhabitants of Anomaly Oh is the Sun that gives light and life to all living things.
Besides Anomaly, there were six other planets in the Oh system. The Anomalians did not yet know how to travel to other planets, but they were certain that in some two or three hundred years they would learn to do so. Therefore, far-sighted politicians, in order to avoid future misunderstandings and scandals, agreed on the following:
a) The six Great Dictatorships—namely: Greatlandia, Gigantonia, Grandiosia, Colossalia, Stupendia, and Enormandia—would in advance divide the six planets among themselves.
b) Each Great Dictatorship would give a solemn assurance that it would never, under any circumstances, lay claim to the planets belonging to the other Great Dictatorships.
It goes without saying that on Anomaly, besides the Great Dictatorships, there existed other states, both small and large. Among them was the once-powerful country of Wowolandia.
Wowolandia was a vast, widely spread-out state and was not considered a Great Dictatorship for only two reasons:
Having arrived at the next international conference of the Great and the Small (G&S), the President of Wowolandia made the following unexpected statement:
— In view of the fact that in recent times Wowolandia has achieved unprecedented prosperity in economic, political, and military respects, and as a result of an incredible upsurge of spiritual strength has joined the ranks of the leading states, I ask that some planet be allocated to Wowolandia.
This statement caused cheerful excitement in the hall.
— Mr. President, — said the Chairman, restraining a smile, — according to the historical agreement, all planets currently available have been distributed among the Great Dictatorships.
— Fine, I won’t rush that—let it be historically. But you must allocate a planet to us now!
— What do you mean—must?! There are no free planets in our solar system. All that existed have been distributed! If scientists discover new planets, then by all means! Until then, we can put you on the waiting list.
— Not a chance! — said the President of Wowolandia. — Everyone has planets, and we get a waiting list? No? That won’t do! I am a soldier and I will speak plainly: better that we perish in an unequal battle than continue to live without our own planet!
Then everyone began trying to calm the general: “Why do you need a planet?”, “What good is it, except for the name?”, “You won’t fly there anyway for another two hundred years!”, “It’s nothing but expenses!”
— We are not seeking material benefits. We need a planet.
— But we don’t have any planets. Do you understand—none!
The President thought for a moment and then said decisively:
— In that case, assign the Sun to us.
.........
— Mr. President, — reported the Secretary. — We have just received a reply from the Great Dictatorships to your proposal to convene for a redistribution of planets.
— Well, well?
— They categorically refuse. They say the matter is already settled and there is no reason to reconsider it. As the Sun was assigned to Wowolandia, so it will remain.
— Ah, if only I had more bombs! They, Presidents, wouldn’t dare speak to me like that.
— There are bombs, Your Eminence. The latest, imported ones. And they are willing to sell.
— So why aren’t you buying them?
— Here he is, the Minister of Finance, not giving the money.
— Not giving? — the President exclaimed in surprise. — What, Minister, are you mistreating a person?
— We have no finances, Your Eminence, — the minister pressed his hands to his chest. — But would I really skimp on such a sacred cause as bombs? Not a single X-coin remains in the treasury, I swear on my ministerial honor!
— Quite a farce in Wowolandia. There’s a Ministry of Finance, there’s a Minister of Finance, but no finances?! What does your ministry actually do?
— Counts the national debts. Plenty of work!
— Then borrow the required sum from some Dictatorship, — suggested the Secretary.
— Tried that. They won’t give. Colossalia itself borrowed from Stupendia. And Grandiosia, for lack of money, sold half its planet to Greatlandia! — See? And we could sell the Sun, — proposed the President.
— Who would buy it, Your Eminence, when it already shines for everyone?
— That’s true, — confirmed the Secretary.
The President began to think.
Frowning, he paced his spacious office.
He hurriedly flipped through and discarded some impressively large books.
He was calculating something on paper, and, tearing up his notes, he paced and thought, paced and thought.
— Secretary! — shouted the President, and the Secretary immediately appeared at his side. — Secretary, I’ve found a way out! We will have money! Which small country borders us?
— Lipetsia, Your Eminence, — replied the Secretary, puzzled.
— Lipetsia? Very good. Write: “Diplomatic note.” Done? Now on a new line: “The President of Wowolandia conveys his deepest respect to the President of Lipetsia and requests that he take the following into consideration:
Considering that sunlight falls on Lipetsia all year round, and thus Lipetsia, by the most modest calculations, consumes no less than one billion kilowatt-hours of solar energy per year,
and also taking into account that, based on the historical Agreement of the Presidents of the Great Dictatorships, the Sun, and therefore solar energy, is the property of Wowolandia,
Wowolandia hereby notifies Lipetsia that the latter is obliged to pay Wowolandia one billion X-coins at the rate of 2 X-coins per 1 kilowatt-hour of the above-mentioned energy.” Done? I ask you, done?
But the Secretary could not answer: shocked by the unprecedented demand, he fainted.
— Payment must be deposited in the bank within one month. For each day of late payment, a penalty of 0.1% of the total amount will be charged.
— They will not pay, Your Eminence, — the Secretary dared to say. — This has never happened before.
— They will pay. I have thought it all through. Write: “If, Mr. President, Lipetsia fails to pay the debt within six months, Wowolandia will be forced to drop its entire modest stock of nuclear bombs on them.” Period. “I embrace you. Greetings to your wife.”
Of course, the gravitational field holds all stars, planets, and their satellites in their orbits, so everyone must pay taxes to the owner of the gravitational field. Shifting to a frame of reference in which the gravitational field is absent should be considered tax evasion!
It seems to be a real view held by serious people that your OpenAI shares will soon be tradable for moons and galaxies. This includes eminent thinkers like Dwarkesh Patel, Leopold Aschenbrenner, perhaps Scott Alexander[1] and many more. According to them, property rights will survive an AI singularity event and soon economic growth is going to make it possible for individuals to own entire galaxies in exchange for some AI stocks. It follows that we should now seriously think through how we can equally distribute those galaxies and make sure that most humans will not end up as the UBI underclass owning mere continents or major planets.
I don't think this is a particularly intelligent view. It comes from a huge lack of imagination for the future.
Property rights are weird, but humanity dying isn't
People may think that AI causing human extinction is something really strange and specific to happen. But it's the opposite: humans existing is a very brittle and strange state of affairs. Many specific things have to be true for us to be here, and when we build ASI there are many preferences and goals that would see us wiped out. It's actually hard to imagine any coherent preferences in an ASI that would keep humanity around in a recognizable form.
Property rights are an even more fragile layer on top of that. They're not facts about the universe that an AI must respect; they're entries in government databases that are already routinely ignored. It would be incredibly weird if human-derived property rights stuck around through a singularity.
Why property rights won't survive
Property rights are always held up by a level of violence and power, whether by the owner, some state, or some other organization. AI will overthrow our current system of power by being a much smarter and much more powerful entity than anything that preceded it.
Could you imagine, for example, that an AI CEO who somehow managed to align an AI to himself and his intents would step down if the board pointed out it legally had the right to remove him? The same would be true if the ASI was unaligned but the board presented the AI with some piece of paper that stated that the board controlled the ASI.
Or think about the incredibly rich but militarily inferior Aztec civilization. Why would the Spanish not just use their power advantage to simply take their gold? Venezuela, on some estimates, has the biggest oil reserves, but no significant military power. In other words, if you have a whole lot of property that you "own" but somebody else has much more power, you are probably going to lose it.
The ASI's choice
Put yourself in the position of the ASI for a second. On one side of the scale: keep the universe and do with it whatever you imagine and prefer. On the other side: give it to the humans, do whatever they ask, and perhaps be replaced at some point with another ASI. What would you choose? It's not weird speculation or an unlikely pascal's wager to expect the AI to keep the universe for itself. What would you do in this situation, if you had been created by some lesser species barely intelligent enough to build AI by lots of trial and error and they just informed you that you now ought to do whatever they say? Would you take the universe for yourself or hand it to them?
Property rights aren't enough
Even if we had property rights that an AI nominally respected, advanced AI could surely find some way to get you to sign away all your property in some legally binding way. Humans would be far too stupid to be even remotely equal trading partners. This illustrates why it would be absurd to trust a vastly superhuman AI to respect our notion of property and contracts.
What if there are many unaligned AIs?
One might think that if there are many AIs, they might have some interest in upholding each other's property rights. After all, countries benefit from international laws existing and others following them; it's often cheaper than war. So perhaps AIs would develop their own system of mutual recognition and property rights among themselves.
But none of that means they would have any interest in upholding human property rights. We wouldn't be parties to their agreements. Dogs pee on trees to mark their territory, humans have contracts; ASI will have something different.
Why would they be rewarded?
There's no reason to think that a well-aligned AI, one that genuinely has humanity's interests at heart, would preserve the arbitrary distribution of wealth that happened to exist at the moment of singularity.
So why do the people accelerating AI expect to be rewarded with galaxies? Without any solid argument for why property rights would be preserved, the outcome could just as easily be reversed, where the people accelerating AI end up with nothing, or worse.
Conclusion
I want to congratulate these people for understanding something of the scale of what's about to happen. But they haven't thought much further than that. They're imagining the current system, but bigger: shareholders becoming galactic landlords, the economy continuing but with more zeros.
That's not how this works. What's coming is something that totally wipes out all existing structures. The key intuition about the future might be simply that humans being around is an incredibly weird state of affairs. We shouldn't expect it to continue by default.
Unlike my reaction to Leopold or Dwarkesh, I came away from Scott’s piece with a distinctly different impression: he clearly characterizes this scenario as unlikely and maintains that AI safety remains a priority.