Published on February 13, 2025 10:35 PM GMT
We know that the fundamental components of reality are relatively homogeneous wherever we look—they’re protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, neutrinos, quarks, and so on. What if we allowed those who don’t want to live in a world dominated by agentic AIs to build spaceships outfitted with BMI armchairs and digitize a copy of Earth—like a modern Noah’s Ark complete with all animals and even every molecule (capturing details such as the scent of roses, because it can turn out to be all just geometry, nothing but shapes and forms)? Saving the geometry of the whole planet and all the animals will require a lot of storage, but no fundamental breakthroughs in technology are needed, just a lot of "hard drives". These ships could then accelerate away from Earth at speeds as close to the speed of light as our technology permits at that moment.
Even if the AIs later begin converting our planet into computronium at near-light speeds—much like white holes—the non-AI faction could happily reside in their initially simplified simulation of Earth because their initial GPUs will be slow and few. This simulation will start with simpler shapes, but as the number of GPUs produced on the ship grows (they put a manufacturing facility before leaving but those GPUs' hardware and software forbids making agentic AIs), the resolution of the geometry will be gradually increased and will eventually become an exact, living virtual replica of our planet. The simulation would automatically protect humans from dangers like car crashes or falls from skyscrapers—they'll simply open their eyes in their armchairs, drink some coffee while observing the beauties of the cosmos on deck, and return to the virtual Earth whenever they wish. One day, after gaining sufficient understanding, they might choose to reconnect their preserved digital Earth with physical reality—effectively planting their virtual planet into some new, physical soil.
After all, it wouldn’t be necessary to back up every atom (they can use an uninhabited planet to obtain some); digitizing all the molecules would potentially suffice to reconnect the digital Earth to physical reality. Maybe it will require some hacking and filling in the blanks, but I don't see why it's 100% impossible in the future.
The flood of unfreedom and rules enforced on humans by the hot AIs of the disfigured and distant physical Earth will, hopefully, subside too when our wiser and not-as-greedy forefathers who chose the non-AI way return and show those who has hopefully survived the way to the multiversal utopia they built. It is a place where no crazy AI can grab too much power, because branches of the multiverse are fully sandboxed and the inhabitants of it can leap verses like cupcakes.
You can better understand the topics discussed here by reading my recent post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LaruPAWaZk9KpC25A/rational-utopia-and-multiversal-ai-alignment-steerable-asi
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