I think there is an interesting calculation to be done here, but the atoms seem obviously irrelevant.
I’d be interested in (a) how large is the slowdown from uploading humans before the information is destroyed? (b) how large is the slowdown from moving biological humans off Earth before rendering it uninhabitable? (c) how large is the slowdown from leaving part of Earth inhabitable to humans indefinitely? (d) how large is the slowdown from leaving most of Earth inhabitable to humans?
I expect it’s possible to estimate these to within an order of magnitude or two. I don’t think any of them depend on atoms. Relevant calculations include: how early would default economic development render Earth uninhabitable, how hard is it to upload or move humans, how important is manufacturing on Earth?
I think that answering these questions will be a part of future work. Without calculations, I think that if AI decides to not touch Earth at all, but use only other plantes and asteorids for its space engineering, it will be around 1 years slowdown for it plus or minus order of magnitude, which translates into losing sonething like one billionth of its total utility.
1 year sounds plausible to me and is similar to my default guess, though I could also imagine it being shorter (getting lots of stuff of Earth is quite hard, and getting a small amount of heavy technology off Earth is quite easy).
I think to create something like a chart where marginal utility of human atoms will be ploted against time=AI’s capabilities and it will be quickly diminishing curve.
One reason that Earth may be still attractive for AI is that it has many high quality enriched ores created by naturally processes which used water and life, and other planets (except may be Mars) have very mixed element composition. But even here using just Pacific ocean and all its underwater mineral resources may be eniugh for AI to boostrap, without much damage to biosphere.
On the other side, Earth is huge gravitational well and everything will be simpler on the asteroid belt.
I think there is an interesting calculation to be done here, but the atoms seem obviously irrelevant.
I’d be interested in (a) how large is the slowdown from uploading humans before the information is destroyed? (b) how large is the slowdown from moving biological humans off Earth before rendering it uninhabitable? (c) how large is the slowdown from leaving part of Earth inhabitable to humans indefinitely? (d) how large is the slowdown from leaving most of Earth inhabitable to humans?
I expect it’s possible to estimate these to within an order of magnitude or two. I don’t think any of them depend on atoms. Relevant calculations include: how early would default economic development render Earth uninhabitable, how hard is it to upload or move humans, how important is manufacturing on Earth?
I think that answering these questions will be a part of future work. Without calculations, I think that if AI decides to not touch Earth at all, but use only other plantes and asteorids for its space engineering, it will be around 1 years slowdown for it plus or minus order of magnitude, which translates into losing sonething like one billionth of its total utility.
1 year sounds plausible to me and is similar to my default guess, though I could also imagine it being shorter (getting lots of stuff of Earth is quite hard, and getting a small amount of heavy technology off Earth is quite easy).
I think to create something like a chart where marginal utility of human atoms will be ploted against time=AI’s capabilities and it will be quickly diminishing curve.
One reason that Earth may be still attractive for AI is that it has many high quality enriched ores created by naturally processes which used water and life, and other planets (except may be Mars) have very mixed element composition. But even here using just Pacific ocean and all its underwater mineral resources may be eniugh for AI to boostrap, without much damage to biosphere.
On the other side, Earth is huge gravitational well and everything will be simpler on the asteroid belt.