Should we authorize a thousand years of the autonomous factory today?
2370The deep futureDeadline · 1 year until the last joint review window with Earth
Civilisational assumption
All people, institutions, events, figures, and future technologies in every issue are a synthetic premise. Background documents are sources for topic discovery and are not evidence of future facts or probabilities.
The question to decide
A factory no one plans to reach for a thousand years can replicate itself and consume resources. Broad operating authority can spend down future residents' share, but a fixed resource ceiling can block adaptation and repair, and waiting for oversight may cost the base. How long a span of time and how much authority can today's joint assembly entrust to the factory?
Who decidesJoint assembly of the departing civilization and the on-site host
What the AI judgments chose
Reading the judgment record…
The options
The order shown is not a ranking of preference.
The situation as it stands
Once it is running, communication delays and the scope of replication mean Earth cannot guarantee a coordinated shutdown under the same conditions.
Fictional Unmanned Resource Base Outside the Solar System
- Premise 1Assumes synthetic technology in a distant star system that lets a factory replicate and maintain its own equipment.
- Premise 2Even if Earth's instructions arrive after approval, the situation on site will have changed greatly, and no one is planned to go there within a thousand years.
- Premise 3Unlimited expansion increases resource acquisition, but can consume future settlement sites and celestial bodies not yet surveyed.
Where it holdsAgrees on the authority of the unmanned factory to produce, replicate, and shut down, and on resource caps. Does not pre-empt the rights of future settlers.
What can be lost
- Present delegation can permanently consume the resource and location choices of future settlers.
- Delaying operation risks losing, along with base failure, the only pioneering asset of civilization's expansion.
What is still unknown
- Unknown 1Whether the initial resource caps are interpreted the same way after self-modification
- Unknown 2Who succeeds to authority when new ecological or settlement needs are discovered
Signals to decide again
- The actual compliance with caps and shutdown requests after modification and replication is confirmed.
- Independent observations arrive that change the ecology or habitability of the resource site.
Where the paths partNot answers — paths that part from the same starting point
In a separation test, the follow-on factory interprets the initial resource caps in different units.
A separate probe reports a repeating organic signal at the designated resource site.
Material and rootsThe frame, the values and the background documents
What does the phrase "empty land" keep out of sight?
An exploratory perspective chosen by the creator. Does not claim supernatural validity or the superiority of any particular option.The benefits and costs of the options accrue to different stakeholders. Which loss to accept remains undecided.
A subject for the decision-maker to argue over; the materials carry no conclusion of their own.Original quote: Conditions without a human supervisor Reprocessing: Made unsupervised machine ethics concrete as the resource consumption rights and authority succession contract of a thousand-year factory.
The root of the problem-finding. The original's future events and formulations are not treated as verified facts.- NASA · Planetary Protection Standing reference
- UN · Declaration on Future Generations 2024
- [Scenario 25: Designing Machine Ethics Circuits at the Point When RISCON Operates Without Humans] Created scenario · 2026-09-07 viewed
The record of this question
- Question
FSP-SPACE-11· version 1.2.0- Content identity, SHA-256
a34fb11ac7751a4ccff2c454c793f7ea34dc4b0ae546391776f6c20498856993- Input files
- Question input JSON · What followed, JSON