All it takes is for humans to have enough wealth in absolute (not relative) terms afford their own habitable shelter and environment, which doesn’t seem implausible?
Anyway, my main objection here is that I expect we’re far away (in economic time) from anything like the Earth being disassembled. As a result, this seems like a long-run consideration, from the perspective of how different the world will be by the time it starts becoming relevant. My guess is that this risk could become significant if humans haven’t already migrated onto computers by this time, they lost all their capital ownership, they lack any social support networks that would be willing to bear these costs (including from potential ems living on computers at that time), and NIMBY political forces become irrelevant. But in most scenarios that I think are realistic, there are simply a lot of ways for the costs of killing humans to disassemble the Earth to be far greater than the benefits.
I’d love to see a scenario by you btw! Your own equivalent of What 2026 Looks Like, or failing that the shorter scenarios here. You’ve clearly thought about this in a decent amount of detail.
Okay, we have wildly different models of tech tree. In my understanding, to make mind uploads you need Awesome Nanotech and if you have misaligned AIs and not-so-awesome nanotech it’s sufficient to kill all humans and start to disassemble Earth. The only coherent scenario that I can imagine misaligned AIs actually participating in human economy in meaningful amounts is scenario where you can’t design nanotech without continent-sized supercomputers.
All it takes is for humans to have enough wealth in absolute (not relative) terms afford their own habitable shelter and environment, which doesn’t seem implausible?
Anyway, my main objection here is that I expect we’re far away (in economic time) from anything like the Earth being disassembled. As a result, this seems like a long-run consideration, from the perspective of how different the world will be by the time it starts becoming relevant. My guess is that this risk could become significant if humans haven’t already migrated onto computers by this time, they lost all their capital ownership, they lack any social support networks that would be willing to bear these costs (including from potential ems living on computers at that time), and NIMBY political forces become irrelevant. But in most scenarios that I think are realistic, there are simply a lot of ways for the costs of killing humans to disassemble the Earth to be far greater than the benefits.
I’d love to see a scenario by you btw! Your own equivalent of What 2026 Looks Like, or failing that the shorter scenarios here. You’ve clearly thought about this in a decent amount of detail.
Okay, we have wildly different models of tech tree. In my understanding, to make mind uploads you need Awesome Nanotech and if you have misaligned AIs and not-so-awesome nanotech it’s sufficient to kill all humans and start to disassemble Earth. The only coherent scenario that I can imagine misaligned AIs actually participating in human economy in meaningful amounts is scenario where you can’t design nanotech without continent-sized supercomputers.