Interesting.

What if there was a way to conceal your RKV or invasion fleet, like some kind of cloaking device or camouflage technique?

And what about spamming an overwhelming number of RKVs or invasion fleets? In theory, you might be able to saturate defences and win a war of attrition if you have a significantly stronger industrial base? If one civilization is already a billion years ahead of another, wouldn't that one be likely to have such an insurmountable lead in control of energy resources that they could simply use sheer numbers?

Also, it's a big assumption to make that there's no wormholes/FTL/time travel shenanigans possible.

With wormholes, it would be possible to, for instance, send an invasion probe with one end of a wormhole, and when it arrives, send forces through from the other end of the wormhole. However, defenders could also have a vast network of wormholes that would allow near instant transfer of forces. If the defenders have good sensor networks, they could also destroy the incoming wormhole probes. Still, if even one wormhole probe gets into the galaxy, the supply lines suddenly don't look so one-sided, and you could, again, spam lots of these probes in the hopes that one makes it there, and then you flood into the galaxy through the wormhole bridgehead.

With FTL, in theory, you could send an RKV with it that their sensors might not be able to detect in time, unless there are FTL sensors, which would negate this. But, if FTL is possible, it's probably equivalent to time travel...

A civilization with time travel is likely to at least know in advance when an attack is coming. This would benefit defence by making the element of surprise even more impossible. And taken to its logical extreme, time travel would likely be used to ensure that no other threatening civilizations come into existence in our lightcone in the first place. This would, in practice, create a universe where every civilization exists in its own otherwise empty bubble, not unlike your predicted universe, but for different reasons than defence dominance.

At least, those are my initial thoughts.

Edit: Also, being able to see the acceleration and deceleration plumes assumes we never develop something more efficient, like say, a light sail, or some kind of beam thruster with almost no beam divergence. These, I imagine, would be harder to detect?

I will take a much stronger stand and also say that I'm very sympathetic to the argument by creatives that using generative AI is inherently unethical for a wide variety of reasons, ranging from the nature of how the data is collected without permission, to the environmental and societal impacts, to the way it degrades our culture through slop.

I'll also throw in from a more doomer perspective that by using these models, we are supporting the AI industry, giving them data and (if you are subscribing) money to rush toward building ever more dangerous systems (even if LLMs don't pan out, the sheer amount of research effort now going into AI makes things likely to reach critical mass) that can already cause things like AI psychosis, are nearing the point of mass replacement of labour with capital, and could one day kill us all.

I do not subscribe to any chatbot services, and have only experimented with free versions to a extent, and have never used them for my coding or writing.

I personally, am seriously considering joining PauseAI and possibly, additionally, boycotting AI products. This from someone who used to be an ML researcher before it was cool.

I'm very much aggrieved to see my life's work used for such tremendous evil as it is now.

I think EA should take a much stronger stand against AI. The public backlash is already starting, and for once, we should pick a side. If the most recent METR trendlines are right, we don't have much time left.

How much of a post are you comfortable for AI to write?

I have a particular writing style that I consider my "voice", and I fundamentally take pride in my writing skill and see writing as a craft and art form, so I refuse to use AI to write a single word of what I would publish to the world.

To me, using AI for writing is equivalent to having someone else write it for you.

Not quite a draft amnesty thing, but I have been playing with the idea of writing short stories or perhaps even novels that use time travellers as a vehicle for Longtermism. The idea is that time travellers from the far distant future are our descendents, the very people that Longtermism cares about, so their perspective could be something worth exploring in fiction.

Given, I'm more of a soft Longtermist, and creative writing is notoriously hard to make any kind of living out of, so I'm not sure to what extent this is worth doing/trying/exploring, even as just a side project.

I've been on this forum since 2014 and I -still- feel this way sometimes. Although, I will say Less Wrong is notably worse for this.

It does get better after you make a few comments/posts and notice people aren't jumping all over you. I used to be much more terrified, but now, I'm only kinda apprehensive whenever I post.

I've explored very similar ideas before in things like this simulation based on the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma but with Death, Asymmetric Power, and Aggressor Reputation. Long story short, the cooperative strategies do generally outlast the aggressive ones in the long run. It's also an idea I've tried to discuss (albeit less rigorously) before as The Alpha Omega Theorem and Superrational Signalling. The first of those was from 2017 and got downvoted to oblivion, while the second was probably too long-winded and got mostly ignored.

There are a bunch of random people like James Miller and A.V. Turchin and Ryo who have had similar ideas that can broadly be categorized under Bostrom's concept of Anthropic Capture, or Game Theoretic Alignment, or possibly a subset of Agent Foundations. The ideas are mostly not taken very seriously by the greater LW and EA communities, so I'd be prepared for a similar reception.

Oh man, I remember the days when Eliezer still called it Friendly and Unfriendly AI. I actually used one of those terms in a question when I was at a Q&A after a tutorial by the then less famous Yoshua Bengio at the 27th Canadian Conference on AI in 2014. He jokingly replied by asking if I was a journalist, before giving a more serious answer saying we were so far away from having to worry about that kind of thing (AI models back then were much more primitive, it was hard to imagine an object recognizer being dangerous). Fun times.

Strong upvoted as that was possibly the most compelling rebuttal to the simulation argument I've seen in quite a while, which was refreshing for my peace of mind.

That being said, it mainly targets the idea of a large-scale simulation of our entire world. What about the possibility that the simulation is for a single entity and that the rest of the world is simulated at a lower fidelity? I had the thought that a way to potentially maximize future lives of good quality would be to contain each conscious life in a separate simulation where they live reasonably good lives catered to their preferences, with the apparent rest of the world being virtual. Given, I doubt this conjecture because in my own opinion my life doesn't seem that great, but it seems plausible at least?

Also, that line about the diamond statue of Hatsune Miku was very, very amusing to this former otaku.

If I recall correctly, the old Felicifia forums (archive) had a lot of debates between negative and other utilitarians about this exact thing. There are also lots of other thought experiment-like "repugnant conclusions" that go with various forums of utilitarianism, including the "Hedonium Shockwave" idea, where you tile the universe with happiness generating computronium as the most efficient way to maximize utility.

The reality is, it's very hard to avoid weird hypothetical conclusions when you take as your ethics a simple rule like "minimize suffering" or "maximize happiness". This is a known problem with consequentialist ethics, and it's up to you if you want to bite the bullet or follow your moral intuitions.