A nightwatchman on every probe: Superintelligent surveillance to prevent galactic anarchy

One utopian vision for space expansion involves a libertarian explosion of diversity, with everyone and their robot setting up different sorts of societies and governance structures.1

We might call such a future ‘galactic anarchy’.

On Earth, while there is anarchy between nation states, within a country the government enforces contracts, protects property rights, and provides for collective defence against external aggressors. A government that does nothing else (e.g. provide a social safety net) is Nozick’s ‘nightwatchman state’. Without a Leviathan to uphold the rule of law, we are left with Hobbes’s war of all against all.

But in the cosmic future, time and space make it far harder to have a centralised Leviathan punishing violations ex post. Suppose an aggressor conquers an already-occupied galaxy. It may take millions of years for nearby galaxies to learn about this infringement and prepare a response. And whose job is it anyway to go and punish the aggressors? That might be difficult and costly, and all the nearby galaxies prefer to mind their own business while strengthening their defences. Any inter-galactic governance system that relies on observing and punishing wrongdoing across millions of light-years is doomed to failure. Justice must be swift. And swift justice must be local,2

not from the next galaxy over.

If space is defence dominant, each star (or galaxy) can self-govern in peace without much fear of being conquered or destroyed by a neighbour. Even so, there are three huge negative externalities that a single rogue star system could impose on the rest of the galactic community:

Even if the chance of any given star system going off the rails in one of these ways is very low, across billions of galaxies each containing millions of star systems that are slowly diverging from their parent civilisations through cultural evolution and drift, it is a statistical inevitability.4

There are also some big upsides that might be harder to achieve under galactic anarchy, such as long-distance moral trade. Suppose that Earl on Earth and Andy in the Andromeda galaxy agree that Earl will spend some resources on hedonium and Andy will spend some resources running copies of Earl. It will plausibly be difficult by default to verify that counterparties are holding up their end of the bargain (from space, compute running hedonium plausibly looks about the same as compute running Earl uploads, so it might be hard for Earl to be confident that Andy is actually running copies of him and not hedonium).

And, even with verification, it might be difficult to enforce contracts from a distance, especially if there are time lags that make it slower to do a tit-for-tat strategy. Suppose that Earl received word that Andy was not running Earl-uploads, 2 million years later. Earl has been faithfully running hedonium for the past 2 million years, so even if Earl stops now, Andy has gotten a lot of value out of Earl. And it might take even longer to propagate the news that Andy is a cheat to all of Andy’s (potential) trade partners.

Funding public goods is also difficult under galactic anarchy. Currently, these are funded by governments coercively taxing their populations and then voting on how to spend the tax dollars. It’s possible that there will be galactic-scale public goods—scientific research, defence against aliens, or setting aside resources for pursuing impartial moral purposes—and the coercive taxation model might be the best way to fund them.

What then can we do? One solution5

is mentioned in passing in AI 2040’s space governance supplement:6

Given the vast distances of space, the monitoring and enforcement governance regime must be dispersed throughout the inhabited universe, rather than in a distant galactic capital. We need to prevent violations before they occur, since we can’t punish them ex post.

Every single inhabited star system should have an unchallengeable governance system that can with 100% reliability7

enforce the universal code of respecting property rights, not destroying the universe, and not creating astronomical suffering. Perfect reliability is not achievable today, but computational systems with backups, error-correction, and formally verified software systems may allow this.

For concreteness, here’s a sketch of a proposal:

We're obviously leaving a lot of governance questions unanswered—how people decide on prohibitions, how people choose which public goods get funded, etc. The space governance supplement has a bit more discussion on some possible answers to these questions. The ‘nightwatchman’ proposal is intended to be a platform on which many different governance systems could be built.

This proposal has some drawbacks. Here are a few of the most important ones.

It’s a lock-in event, and it would be bad if we locked in a bad policy for the nightwatchmen. If the code is too expansive, and too hard to update, it may close off moral and social progress and innovation. We are certainly glad that no government has historically had the power to lock in a legal code indefinitely. But if the code is too minimal, or too easy to update, rogue actors will find a way to route around the letter of the law, or simply alter the code in undesired ways.

The AI Futures Project's space governance appendix discusses some possibilities for how the code could be chosen and revised (see the section titled “Mitigating downside risks”). In any case, we think that the final version of the code—if there is a final one—should only be decided after careful reflection.

That said, the nightwatchman proposal tries to preserve as much future human agency as possible without imperilling galactic civilisation. Alternate proposals could give up altogether on diversity (e.g. a ‘hedonium shockwave’) or freedom (e.g. a sovereign AI that is immensely wise and makes all important decisions in each star system). So this may be close to the minimum amount of lock-in necessary to avoid catastrophe.

It introduces a single point of vulnerability among all the colonies. If all the nightwatchmen were identical and it turned out that they had a bug, then we would be in trouble because they have a decisive strategic advantage over all the star systems we’ve settled. We might be able to mitigate this by designing different nightwatchmen in very different ways, even if they would all ultimately be enforcing the same policy. But the more different nightwatchmen designs there are, the higher the chance that one of them is flawed, which allows a star system to go rogue and destroy its lightcone. So there is some inherent tradeoff between diversity and security here.

Plausibly it inherently reduces the value of the future for some people (e.g. it is incompatible with some conceptions of freedom, self-determination, or privacy). Surveillance would probably have to be fairly extensive—the nightwatchman needs to detect attempts to create superweapons, to send spacecraft to other star systems, and to remove the nightwatchman’s ability to monitor and enforce its policies in the future. It’s plausible that it would need to monitor every large industrial facility in each star system. The details will be determined by what is possible at technological maturity, such as the minimum requirements to build and launch a near-light-speed probe.

But enforcement should and could be narrowly targeted to preventing these very serious, galactic-scale harms. Otherwise, the nightwatchman should allow the inhabitants of the star system to govern themselves in whatever way they wish. The universal code could also specify different levels of verification and enforcement: if surveillance is lax enough that a few people avoid paying their galactic taxes to contribute to moral public goods, that is not the end of the universe. But surveillance to prevent false vacuum decay must be incredibly robust.

The nightwatchmen could also be time-limited. After all reachable star systems are settled, and ideally once galaxies have drifted apart such that they are no longer causally connected, the nightwatchmen could switch themselves off. A massive governance failure in one galaxy (e.g. vacuum decay) then could not spread to others, containing the damage. On plausible cosmological theories, the vast majority of lives might be lived in this ‘twilight’ of many causally disconnected pockets. So even if extensive surveillance ends up having large costs, only a very small fraction of lives need be lived under such conditions.13

This would not prevent suffering risks, though.

Currently, we shouldn’t trust any government with this power, as surveillance tech designed to stop terrorists is dual-use and could also be used to e.g. detect political dissidents. But it will likely eventually be possible to build provably secure AI systems with precisely specified remits, in this case to enforce the universal code (see proposals on ‘structured transparency’ for a sketch of what this could look like).

This is a crux for us—if it’s not possible to get these strong guarantees that the nightwatchman would only enforce the narrow universal code, then we would probably oppose it.

Many questions of optimal space governance—such as what combination of democracy, markets, and wise ASI oracles should determine how space resources are used14

—remain very open. But we think the question of whether colonists should be allowed to set off into the unknown and entirely self-govern can be answered in the negative. Encouragingly, we expect people will come to realise this before it is too late and the von Neumann probes have left the solar system. But this isn’t guaranteed! This post is our small attempt to make galactic anarchy less likely.