Physical limits and the long-term future (with Anders Sandberg)

1. Improve Digital & Cultural Backups

Actively work to create more robust and cohesive systems for backing up digital data and cultural information, moving beyond reliance on single private institutions or corporate data centers. This ensures the preservation of critical knowledge for future generations and as a safeguard against civilizational disruptions.

2. Assess Suffering Risks in Expansion

Before expanding life across the universe, carefully evaluate the potential for generating immense suffering, especially if adopting an ethical framework that prioritizes the avoidance of suffering. Consider the moral implications of creating vast amounts of conscious experience.

3. Deliberate Before Spreading Life

Do not rush to spread life into the universe without careful consideration. The moral stakes are extremely high, and a thorough ethical and practical assessment is warranted before taking such a potentially irreversible action.

4. Utilize Open Systems for Order

Recognize that in an open system, you can locally reduce entropy and organize things by leveraging energy flow and expelling waste heat to the wider universe. This principle allows for complex organization despite the overall increase in universal entropy.

5. Leverage Limits for Future Rigor

When making predictions or decisions about the future, especially the long-term, seek out and understand fundamental theoretical limits (e.g., laws of physics). These limits provide a solid, rigorous foundation for analysis, even if current understanding of them might evolve.

6. Bound Civilization by Energy Budget

Understand that the amount of useful work a civilization can do is fundamentally bounded by its available mass-energy and its ability to dump waste heat. Use this principle to assess the potential activities and limits of future civilizations.

7. Explore Black Hole Power Potential

Recognize that fusion, while powerful, only converts a small fraction of mass into energy. For ultimate energy extraction, consider methods like carefully dumping mass into black holes, which can convert a much larger percentage of mass into usable energy.

8. Use Incentives for AI Alignment

Leverage principles of incentive design, typically used to ensure good behavior in companies and markets, to align complex AI systems. Foster interdisciplinary collaboration between AI safety, economics, and political science to develop effective alignment mechanisms for both AI and human-cyborg composite systems.

9. Foster Civilizational Virtues

Recognize that virtues can be ascribed to groups and societies, not just individuals. Actively work to create coordination structures within humanity that enable the development of ‘virtue-apt’ civilizations capable of embodying virtues like intellectual honesty or environmental stewardship.

10. Optimize Services for Efficiency

Recognize that many services and computing processes are tremendously inefficient and far from thermodynamic limits. Actively seek to improve efficiency in terms of energy, transport, and organization within services to achieve decoupling and run civilization more efficiently.

11. Prioritize Reversible Operations

Understand that only irreversible operations, where information is lost, inherently cost energy due to entropy increase. Aim to design systems and processes with reversible operations where possible to minimize energy expenditure.

12. Budget for Error Correction Energy

Understand that error correction is an inherently irreversible and energy-costly operation. Even in highly efficient or reversible systems, account for the energy budget required for error correction, as it will likely be a significant long-term cost.

13. Factor Imperfection into Design

Recognize that ‘in principle’ theoretical efficiencies (like reversible computing) are often limited by real-world imperfections and constraints like temperature and speed. Be prepared to make trade-offs, potentially using less efficient irreversible processes, to achieve practical results within time limits.

14. Anticipate Surprises, Use Current Limits

While using current understanding of physical limits as a starting point for future planning, remain open to the possibility that these limits might be revised or proven wrong. Expect ’nasty surprises’ and adapt as new knowledge emerges.

15. Consider Early Life Great Filter

When contemplating the sparsity of alien civilizations (Fermi paradox), consider the hypothesis that the ‘Great Filter’ might occur early in the evolution of life, where most biospheres fail to evolve beyond simple single-cell organisms.

16. Balance Green Efficiency with Speed

When pursuing green initiatives or energy efficiency, be aware of the trade-off between energy consumption and speed. Achieving high efficiency (e.g., lower temperature processes) often requires sacrificing speed.

17. Embrace Slower, Controlled Growth

Understand that rapid growth, while seemingly efficient, can invite problems (e.g., cancer in biological systems). A slower, more controlled approach to building or developing things might be beneficial to avoid unintended negative consequences.

18. Manage Internal Resource Competition

Recognize that even within a unified mission, different parts of an organization or system will compete for resources when priorities are set. Acknowledge the ‘grumbling’ that arises when resources are constrained, even if the overall decision is rational.

19. Heed Counter-Intuitive Math

Learn from historical examples where counter-intuitive mathematical predictions (like antiparticles) turned out to be real. Be willing to take mathematical results seriously, even if they suggest very strange or unexpected aspects of reality.

20. Distinguish Model Failure from Reality

Develop the ability to discern whether a model is simply broken and producing nonsense, or if it’s accurately reflecting a weird pattern of reality. This critical discernment is a hallmark of high-quality thinking.

21. Prioritize Clear, Objective Explanations

Strive for explanations that are robust and hold true regardless of personal beliefs or biases. Use analogies carefully, ensuring they clarify rather than introduce ’noise’ or confusion into understanding.

22. Beware Misapplied Scientific Metaphors

Be cautious of taking scientific results (especially from physics or math) metaphorically and then reifying them as literal truths to justify unrelated concepts. Ensure that scientific principles are applied accurately and not just for rhetorical convenience.

23. Declare Intuition’s Role Explicitly

When constructing arguments, especially in philosophy, be transparent about where intuitions are being relied upon. Unacknowledged reliance on intuition can weaken arguments and make them less apparent.

24. Differentiate Truth from Behavior

Understand that if you cannot distinguish between something being truly X and merely behaving as if it were X, then you don’t truly know if X is correct. This highlights the importance of empirical testability and avoiding premature conclusions about underlying reality.

25. Strive for Utmost Clarity

In any complex discussion or explanation, the most effective approach is to be as clear as possible. This helps mitigate biases and ensures that arguments and concepts are understood accurately.