I’m curious about how this interacts with space colonisation. The default path of efficient competition would likely lead to maximally fast space-colonisation, to prevent others from grabbing it first. But this would make deliberating together with other humans a lot trickier, since some space ships would go to places where they could never again communicate with each other. For things to turn out ok, I think you either need:
to pause before space colonisation.
to finish deliberating and bargaining before space colonisation.
to equip each space ship with the information necessary for deciding what to do with the space they grab. In order of increasing ambitiousness:
You could upload a few leaders’ or owners’ brains (or excellent predictive model thereof) and send them along with their respective colonisation ships; hoping that they will individually reach good decisions without discussing with the rest of humanity.
You could also equip each colonisation ship with the uploads of all other human brains that they might want to deliberate with (or excellent predictive models thereof), so that they can use those other human as discussion partners and data for their deliberation-efforts.
You also set up these uploads in a way that makes them figure out what bargain would have been struck on Earth; and then have each space ship individually implement this. Maybe this happens by default with acausal trade; or maybe everyone in some reasonably big coalition could decide to follow the decision of some specified deliberative process that they don’t have time to run on Earth.
to use some communication scheme that lets you send your space ships ahead to compete in space, and then lets you send instructions to your own ships once you’ve finished deliberating on Earth.
E.g. maybe you could use cryptography to ensure that your space ships will follow instructions signed with the right code; which you only send out once you’ve finished bargaining. (Though I’m not sure if your bargaining-partners would be able to verify how your space ships would react to any particular message; so maybe this wouldn’t work without significant prior coordination.)
I’m curious wheter you’re optimistic about any of these options, or if you have something else in mind.
(Also, all of this assumes that defensive capabilities are a lot stronger than offensive capabilities in space. If offense is comparably strong, than we also have the problem that the cosmic commons might be burned in wars if we don’t pause or reach some other agreement before space colonisation.)
I think I’m basically optimistic about every option you list.
I think space colonization is extremely slow relative to deliberation (at technological maturity I think you probably have something like million-fold speedup over flesh and blood humans, and colonization takes place over decades and millennia rather than years). Deliberation may not be “finished” until the end of the universe, but I think we will e.g. have deliberated enough to make clear agreements about space colonization / to totally obsolete existing thinking / likely to have reached a “grand compromise” from which further deliberation can be easily decentralized.
I think it’s very easy for someone to purchase a slice of every ship or otherwise ensure representation, and have a delegate they trust (perhaps the same one they would have used for deliberating locally, e.g. just a copy of their favorite souped-up emulation) on every ship. The technology for that seems to come way before tech for maximally fast space colonization (and you don’t really leave the solar system until you have extremely mature space colonization, since you’ll get very easily overtaken later). That could involve people having influence over each of the colonization projects, or could involve delegates whose only real is to help inform someone who actually has power in the project / to participate in acausal trade.
I think it’s fairly likely that space ships will travel slowly enough that you can beam information to them and do the kind of scheme you outline where you deliberate at home and then beam instructions out. I think this is pretty unlikely, but if everything else fails it would probably be reasonably painless. I think the main obstruction would be leaving your descendants abroad vulnerable if your descendants at home get compromised. (It’s also a problem if descendants at home go off the rails, but getting compromised is more concerning because it can happen to either descendants abroad or at home).
(Also, all of this assumes that defensive capabilities are a lot stronger than offensive capabilities in space. If offense is comparably strong, than we also have the problem that the cosmic commons might be burned in wars if we don’t pause or reach some other agreement before space colonisation.)
This seems like maybe the most likely single reason you need to sort everything out in advance, though the general consideration in favor of option value (and waiting a year or two being no big deal) seems even more important. I do expect to have plenty of time to do that.
I haven’t thought about any of these details much because it seems like such an absurdly long subjective time before we leave the solar system, and so there will be huge amounts of time for our descendants to make bargains before them. I am much more concerned about destructive technologies that require strong coordination long before we leave. (Or about option value lost by increasing the computational complexity of your simulation and so becoming increasingly uncorrelated with some simulators.)
One reason you might have to figure these things out in advance is if you try to decouple competition from deliberation by doing something like secure space rights (i.e. binding commitments to respect property rights, have no wars ever, and divide up the cosmos in an agreeable way). It’s a bit hard to see how we could understand the situation well enough to reach an agreeable compromise directly (rather than defining a mutually-agreeable deliberative process to which we will defer and which has enough flexibility to respond to unknown unknowns about colonization dynamics) but if it was a realistic possibility then it might require figuring a lot of stuff out sooner rather than later.
Thanks, computer-speed deliberation being a lot faster than space-colonisation makes sense. I think any deliberation process that uses biological humans as a crucial input would be a lot slower, though; slow enough that it could well be faster to get started with maximally fast space colonisation. Do you agree with that? (I’m a bit surprised at the claim that colonization takes place over “millenia” at technological maturity; even if the travelling takes millenia, it’s not clear to me why launching something maximally-fast – that you presumably already know how to build, at technological maturity – would take millenia. Though maybe you could argue that millenia-scale travelling time implies millenia-scale variance in your arrival-time, in which case launching decades or centuries after your competitors doesn’t cost you too much expected space?)
If you do agree, I’d infer that your mainline expectation is that we succesfully enforce a worldwide pause before mature space-colonisation; since the OP suggests that biological humans are likely to be a significant input into the deliberation process, and since you think that the beaming-out-info schemes are pretty unlikely.
(I take your point that as far as space-colonisation is concerned; such a pause probably isn’t strictly necessary.)
I agree that biological human deliberation is slow enough that it would need to happen late.
By “millennia” I mostly meant that traveling is slow (+ the social costs of delay are low, I’m estimating like 1/billionth of value per year of delay). I agree that you can start sending fast-enough-to-be-relevant ships around the singularity rather than decades later. I’d guess the main reason speed matters initially is for grabbing resources from nearby stars under whoever-gets-their-first property rights (but that we probably will move away from that regime before colonizing).
I do expect to have strong global coordination prior to space colonization. I don’t actually know if you would pause long enough for deliberation amongst biological humans to be relevant. So on reflection I’m not sure how much time you really have as biological humans. In the OP I’m imagining 10+ years (maybe going up to a generation) but that might just not be realistic.
Probably my single best guess is that some (many?) people would straggle out over years or decades (in the sense that relevant deliberation for controlling what happens with their endowment would take place with biological humans living on earth), but that before that there would be agreements (reached at high speed) to avoid them taking a huge competitive hit by moving slowly.
But my single best guess is not that likely and it seems much more likely that something else will happen (and even that I would conclude that some particular other thing is much more likely if I thought about it more).
I’m curious about how this interacts with space colonisation. The default path of efficient competition would likely lead to maximally fast space-colonisation, to prevent others from grabbing it first. But this would make deliberating together with other humans a lot trickier, since some space ships would go to places where they could never again communicate with each other. For things to turn out ok, I think you either need:
to pause before space colonisation.
to finish deliberating and bargaining before space colonisation.
to equip each space ship with the information necessary for deciding what to do with the space they grab. In order of increasing ambitiousness:
You could upload a few leaders’ or owners’ brains (or excellent predictive model thereof) and send them along with their respective colonisation ships; hoping that they will individually reach good decisions without discussing with the rest of humanity.
You could also equip each colonisation ship with the uploads of all other human brains that they might want to deliberate with (or excellent predictive models thereof), so that they can use those other human as discussion partners and data for their deliberation-efforts.
You also set up these uploads in a way that makes them figure out what bargain would have been struck on Earth; and then have each space ship individually implement this. Maybe this happens by default with acausal trade; or maybe everyone in some reasonably big coalition could decide to follow the decision of some specified deliberative process that they don’t have time to run on Earth.
to use some communication scheme that lets you send your space ships ahead to compete in space, and then lets you send instructions to your own ships once you’ve finished deliberating on Earth.
E.g. maybe you could use cryptography to ensure that your space ships will follow instructions signed with the right code; which you only send out once you’ve finished bargaining. (Though I’m not sure if your bargaining-partners would be able to verify how your space ships would react to any particular message; so maybe this wouldn’t work without significant prior coordination.)
I’m curious wheter you’re optimistic about any of these options, or if you have something else in mind.
(Also, all of this assumes that defensive capabilities are a lot stronger than offensive capabilities in space. If offense is comparably strong, than we also have the problem that the cosmic commons might be burned in wars if we don’t pause or reach some other agreement before space colonisation.)
I think I’m basically optimistic about every option you list.
I think space colonization is extremely slow relative to deliberation (at technological maturity I think you probably have something like million-fold speedup over flesh and blood humans, and colonization takes place over decades and millennia rather than years). Deliberation may not be “finished” until the end of the universe, but I think we will e.g. have deliberated enough to make clear agreements about space colonization / to totally obsolete existing thinking / likely to have reached a “grand compromise” from which further deliberation can be easily decentralized.
I think it’s very easy for someone to purchase a slice of every ship or otherwise ensure representation, and have a delegate they trust (perhaps the same one they would have used for deliberating locally, e.g. just a copy of their favorite souped-up emulation) on every ship. The technology for that seems to come way before tech for maximally fast space colonization (and you don’t really leave the solar system until you have extremely mature space colonization, since you’ll get very easily overtaken later). That could involve people having influence over each of the colonization projects, or could involve delegates whose only real is to help inform someone who actually has power in the project / to participate in acausal trade.
I think it’s fairly likely that space ships will travel slowly enough that you can beam information to them and do the kind of scheme you outline where you deliberate at home and then beam instructions out. I think this is pretty unlikely, but if everything else fails it would probably be reasonably painless. I think the main obstruction would be leaving your descendants abroad vulnerable if your descendants at home get compromised. (It’s also a problem if descendants at home go off the rails, but getting compromised is more concerning because it can happen to either descendants abroad or at home).
This seems like maybe the most likely single reason you need to sort everything out in advance, though the general consideration in favor of option value (and waiting a year or two being no big deal) seems even more important. I do expect to have plenty of time to do that.
I haven’t thought about any of these details much because it seems like such an absurdly long subjective time before we leave the solar system, and so there will be huge amounts of time for our descendants to make bargains before them. I am much more concerned about destructive technologies that require strong coordination long before we leave. (Or about option value lost by increasing the computational complexity of your simulation and so becoming increasingly uncorrelated with some simulators.)
One reason you might have to figure these things out in advance is if you try to decouple competition from deliberation by doing something like secure space rights (i.e. binding commitments to respect property rights, have no wars ever, and divide up the cosmos in an agreeable way). It’s a bit hard to see how we could understand the situation well enough to reach an agreeable compromise directly (rather than defining a mutually-agreeable deliberative process to which we will defer and which has enough flexibility to respond to unknown unknowns about colonization dynamics) but if it was a realistic possibility then it might require figuring a lot of stuff out sooner rather than later.
Thanks, computer-speed deliberation being a lot faster than space-colonisation makes sense. I think any deliberation process that uses biological humans as a crucial input would be a lot slower, though; slow enough that it could well be faster to get started with maximally fast space colonisation. Do you agree with that? (I’m a bit surprised at the claim that colonization takes place over “millenia” at technological maturity; even if the travelling takes millenia, it’s not clear to me why launching something maximally-fast – that you presumably already know how to build, at technological maturity – would take millenia. Though maybe you could argue that millenia-scale travelling time implies millenia-scale variance in your arrival-time, in which case launching decades or centuries after your competitors doesn’t cost you too much expected space?)
If you do agree, I’d infer that your mainline expectation is that we succesfully enforce a worldwide pause before mature space-colonisation; since the OP suggests that biological humans are likely to be a significant input into the deliberation process, and since you think that the beaming-out-info schemes are pretty unlikely.
(I take your point that as far as space-colonisation is concerned; such a pause probably isn’t strictly necessary.)
I agree that biological human deliberation is slow enough that it would need to happen late.
By “millennia” I mostly meant that traveling is slow (+ the social costs of delay are low, I’m estimating like 1/billionth of value per year of delay). I agree that you can start sending fast-enough-to-be-relevant ships around the singularity rather than decades later. I’d guess the main reason speed matters initially is for grabbing resources from nearby stars under whoever-gets-their-first property rights (but that we probably will move away from that regime before colonizing).
I do expect to have strong global coordination prior to space colonization. I don’t actually know if you would pause long enough for deliberation amongst biological humans to be relevant. So on reflection I’m not sure how much time you really have as biological humans. In the OP I’m imagining 10+ years (maybe going up to a generation) but that might just not be realistic.
Probably my single best guess is that some (many?) people would straggle out over years or decades (in the sense that relevant deliberation for controlling what happens with their endowment would take place with biological humans living on earth), but that before that there would be agreements (reached at high speed) to avoid them taking a huge competitive hit by moving slowly.
But my single best guess is not that likely and it seems much more likely that something else will happen (and even that I would conclude that some particular other thing is much more likely if I thought about it more).