I might write a top level post or shortform about this at some point. I find it baffling how casually people talk about dismantling the Sun around here. I recognize that this post makes no normative claim that we should do it, but it doesn’t say that it would be bad either, and expects that we will do it even if humanity remains in power. I think we probably won’t do it if humanity remains in power, we shouldn’t do it, and if humanity disassembles the Sun, it will probably happen for some very bad reason, like a fanatical dictatorship getting in power.
If we get some even vaguely democratic system that respects human rights at least a little, then many people (probably the vast majority) will want to live on Earth in their physical bodies and many will want to have children, and many of those children will also want to live on Earth and have children on their own. I find it unlikely that all subcultures that want this will die out on Earth in 10,000 years, especially considering the selections effects: the subcultures that prefer to have natural children on Earth are the ones that natural selection favors on Earth. So the scenarios when humanity dismantles the Sun probably involve a dictatorship rounding up the Amish and killing them while maybe uploading their minds somewhere, against all their protestation. Or possibly rounding up the Amish, and forcibly “increasing their intelligence and wisdom” by some artificial means, until they realize that their “coherent extrapolated volition” was in agreement with the dictatorship all along, and then killing off their bodies after their new mind consents. I find this option hardly any better. (Also, it’s not just the Amish you are hauling to the extermination camps kicking and screaming, but my mother too. And probably your mother as well. Please don’t do that.)
Also, I think the astronomical waste is probably pretty negligible. You can probably create a very good industrial base around the Sun with just some Dyson swarm that doesn’t take up enough light to be noticeable from Earth. And then you can just send out some probes to Alpha Centauri and the other neighboring stars to dismantle them if we really want to. How much time do we lose by this? My guess is at most a few years, and we probably want to take some years anyway to do some reflection before we start any giant project.
People sometimes accuse the rationalist community of being aggressive naive utilitarians, who only believe that the AGI is going to kill everyone, because they are only projecting themselves to it, as they also want to to kill everyone if they get power, so they can establish their mind-uploaded, we-are-the-grabby-aliens, turn-the-stars-into-computronium utopia a few months earlier that way. I think this accusation is mostly false, and most rationalists are in fact pretty reasonable and want to respect other people’s rights and so on. But when I see people casually discussing dismantling the Sun, with only one critical comment (Mikhail’s) that we shouldn’t do it, and it shows up in Solstice songs as a thing we want to do in the Great Transhumanist Future twenty years from now, I start worrying again that the critics are right, and we are the bad guys.
I prefer to think that it’s not because people are in fact happy about massacring the Amish and their own mothers, but because dismantling the Sun is a meme, and people don’t think through what it means. Anyway, please stop.
(Somewhat relatedly, I think it’s not obvious at all that if a misaligned AGI takes over the world, it will dismantle the Sun. It is more likely to do it than humanity would, but still, I don’t know how you could be any confident that the misaligned AI that first takes over will be the type of linear utilitarian optimizer that really cares about conquering the last stars at the edge of the Universe, so needs to dismantle the star in order to speed up its conquest with a few years.)
I think this is a false dilemma. If all human cultures on Earth come to the conclusion in 1000 years that they would like the Sun to be dismantled (which I very much doubt), then sure, we can do that. But at that point, we could already have built awesome industrial bases by dismantling Alpha Centauri, or just building them up by dismantling 0.1% of the Sun that doesn’t affect anything on Earth. I doubt that totally dismantling the Sun after centuries would significantly accelerate the time we reach the cosmic event horizon.
The thing that actually has costs is not to immediately bulldoze down Earth and turn it into a maximally efficient industrial powerhouse at the cost of killing every biological body. Or if the ASI has the opportunity to dismantle the Sun in a short notice (the post alludes to 10,000 years being a very conservative estimate and “the assumption that ASI eats the Sun within a few years”). But that’s not going to happen democratically. There is no way you get 51% of people [1] to vote for bulldozing down Earth and killing their biological bodies, and I very much doubt you get that vote even for dismantling the Sun in a few years and putting some fake sky around Earth for protection. It’s possible there could be a truly wise philosopher king who could with aching heart overrule everyone else’s objection and bulldoze down Earth to get those extra 200 galaxies at the edge of the Universe, but then govern the Universe wisely and benevolently in a way that people on reflection all approve of. But in practice, we are not going to get a wise philosopher king. I expect that any government that decides to destroy the Sun for the greater good, against the outrage of the vast majority of people, will also be a bad ruler of the Universe.
I also believe that AI alignment is not a binary, and even in the worlds where there is no AI takeover, we will probably get an AI we initially can’t fully tust that will follow the spirit of our commands in exotic situations we can’t really understand. In that case, it would be extremely unwise to immediately instruct it to create mind uploads (how faithful those will be?) and bulldoze down the world to turn the Sun into computronium. There are a lot of reasons for taking things slow.
Usually rationalists are pretty reasonable about these things, and endorse democratic government and human rights, and they even often like talking about the Long Reflection a taking things slow. But then they start talking about dismantling the Sun! This post can kind of defend itself that it was proposing a less immediate and horrifying implementation (though there really is a missing mood here), but there are other examples, most notably the Great Transhumanist Future song in last year’s Solstice, where a coder looks up to the burning Sun disapprovingly, and in twenty years with a big ol’ computer they will use the Sun as a battery.
I don’t know if the people talking like that are so out of touch that they believe that with a little convincing everyone will agree to dismantle the Sun in twenty years, or they would approve of an AI-enabled dictatorship bulldozing over Earth, or they just don’t think through the implications. I think it’s mostly that they just don’t think about it too hard, but I did hear people coming out in favor of actually bulldozing down Earth (usually including a step where we forcibly increase everyone’s intelligence until they agree with the leadership), and I think that’s very foolish and bad.
And even 51% of the vote wouldn’t be enough in any good democracy to bulldoze over everyone else