the author's basically saying most arguments about ai safety timelines miss the point - if you care about humanity's long-term potential, even a 1000-year delay in agi development could be worth it to preserve our claim to the universe's resources. the rush to create agi is essentially humanity voluntarily ceding control of its cosmic inheritance to a rival species. it's a more nuanced take than typical doom scenarios - less "we all die" and more "we become cosmic pets with a tiny resource allocation."
Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment. “This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained. Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”