LessWrong post warns against normalizing permanent cosmic inequality

In a LessWrong post titled "Don't normalize a permanent underclass (even a rich one)," author hadad critiques the Epilogue of the influential AI governance document AI 2040: Plan A. The Epilogue presents a future where pre-AGI wealth distribution is reflected in permanent property rights over cosmic resources, with some people buying up entire galaxies. The document acknowledges that tradability of space claims for Earth assets leads to disproportionate control by the wealthy, but treats this as a tolerable cost of an otherwise wonderful outcome. Hadad argues this is a critical design choice, not a law of nature—and one that should not be normalized.

The stakes go far beyond luxury goods. Negentropy—the resource that buys years of subjective existence, compute for cognition, and utilitarian happiness—scales linearly with resources controlled. A person with 1,000 galaxies would have roughly 1,000 times the lifespan of someone with just one. The Epilogue's arrangement effectively sentences the less wealthy to die 1,000 times sooner based on the accident of when AGI arrived. Hadad warns that policymakers read these documents, and treating this inequality as acceptable shifts the Overton window toward implementing exactly such outcomes. The post calls for refusing to accept any level of permanent, unalterable inequality, even if the underclass is rich by today's standards.