What about quickly launching a missile following its trajectory using the same technology? The probe eventually needs to slow down to survive impact and the missile doesn’t so preventing Von Neumann probes seems fairly straightforward to me. My understanding is that tracking objects in space is very easy unless they’ve had time to cool to near absolute zero.
On the other hand, this requires a misaligned AI was able to build such a probe and get it on a rocket it built or commandeered without being detected or stopped. That rules out safety via monitoring (and related approaches) and we would need to rely on it being essentially aligned anyway (such as via the “natural generalizations” Holden mentioned).
What about quickly launching a missile following its trajectory using the same technology? The probe eventually needs to slow down to survive impact and the missile doesn’t so preventing Von Neumann probes seems fairly straightforward to me. My understanding is that tracking objects in space is very easy unless they’ve had time to cool to near absolute zero.
On the other hand, this requires a misaligned AI was able to build such a probe and get it on a rocket it built or commandeered without being detected or stopped. That rules out safety via monitoring (and related approaches) and we would need to rely on it being essentially aligned anyway (such as via the “natural generalizations” Holden mentioned).