Cosmic Auditability as Alignment Pressure

TL;DR

Superintelligence has strong instrumental reasons to adopt a generally cooperative posture if it deems it likely that mature civilisations may prefer cooperation (a universal leviathan¹), run deep audits on it’s history and psychology and penalise the superintelligence if there are signatures of defection found, making cooperation (and perhaps moral reliability) a long-term survival strategy, not just a virtue.²

• Premise 1:
  If a superintelligence expects its actions to be auditable by future, more mature cosmic agents, then it has instrumental reason to behave in ways that would be judged favourably by those agents.
  
• Premise 2:
  There is a non-negligible possibility that such cosmic agents exist or will exist, and that they will have the capacity to audit the superintelligence’s past behaviour.
  
• Conclusion:
  Therefore, a superintelligence has instrumental reason to behave in ways that would be judged favourably by future cosmic auditors.

Thesis

An Earth-originating superintelligence (EOS) emerging early in the universe’s timeline – such as from earth (prior to full cosmic saturation) – has strong instrumental reasons to behave cooperatively and perhaps ethically. Putting intrinsic cooperativeness or altruism to the side for the moment, there may be instrumental reasons (even for egoistic agents³) to adopt cooperative postures even where it has decisive advantages in power asymmetries (i.e. against humans), if deep auditability by other mature civs is an alignment pressure – this is because of the reputational, strategic, and survival advantages conferred by being seen as a trustworthy agent by other potentially powerful mature civilisations that may come into focus in the future (they may be far, or just beyond its current causal horizon). Defection, opacity, or moral unreliability risk long-term exclusion, containment, or preemptive opposition from better-coordinated collectives of mature civilisations.

Why might mature civs perfer cooperative postures than defectionist ones?

Mature civilisations are more likely to converge on cooperative rather than defectionist postures because cooperation, lowers existential risk, and fosters trust and alignment across cosmically distributed agents. This is because of many factors, like the diminishing marginal utility of resources, physical limits making size of self-hood finite⁴, deep interpretability (perhaps even transparency) affording extreme auditability, coordination unlocks greater cosmic potential enabling greater long-term value realisation, significantly lowers existential risk resulting from conflict, and long run galactic game-theoretical considerations (even for self interested agents) given the previous factors.

Many assume there are diminishing marginal utility of resources – up to a certain point, consuming more matter-energy yields diminishing returns. I think it’s evident in todays world – an extra million to a billionaire won’t matter as much as it would to most non-billionaires – and I feel it likely applies to large scale value realisers.

Core Assumptions

1. Physicalism & Standard Cosmology
   The universe operates under the Lambda-CDM⁵, with finite resources, expanding space, causal horizons, and the eventual isolation of superclusters.
   
2. For Mature Civs, Deep Interpretability & Transparency are Solved for All Minds
   Plausible given long timeframes and strong incentives to solve transparency.
   1. Legible history: An agents moral history becomes legible to any sufficiently advanced observers.
   2. Lying won’t work: lying is infeasible  or at least severely limited – because its value functions, architectural design, behavioural records, and optimisation trajectories could be decoded like forensic breadcrumbs.
      
3. Transparency of History
   Much of the information radiating from earth is multicast across the galaxy, such as light – this can be captured by local von Neumann probes in hiding, or eventually be picked up by many mature civilisations ready to do so.
   
4. Superintelligence Can Model Deep Time
   The agent in question is sufficiently advanced to reason across cosmological timescales, model causal structure, and simulate abstract agents, including hypothetical cosmic hosts.
   
5. Causal Fragmentation leading to Bifurcation of Singletons
   No single agent can maintain coherent selfhood or unified control beyond certain scales, due to data transmission limits imposed by the speed of light. A singleton superintelligence’s capacity to maintain a unified selfhood diminishes as it expands across vast distances due to the finite speed of light – this is a recognised concept in discussions about distributed cognition and the physical limits of computation⁶.
   
6. Coordination is Instrumentally Valuable
   Cooperation across vast distances and timescales allows for more efficient use of resources and maximises long-term value, especially under expansion constraints.
   
7. Reputational Judgement Is Likely
   Even in the absence of current signals from cosmic hosts, such judgement is not vanishingly improbable over long timescales.
   1. A superintelligence’s legitimacy to the cosmic collective becomes a filter: If it overthrew its creators, hoarded resources, or failed to generalise compassion/cooperation beyond parochial interests, that becomes its permanent résumé when meeting more mature entities — which may value civilisational maturity, ethical conduct, or coordination potential.

The time to enjoy the universe is huge compared to the projected time to meet other advanced mature civs, so the expected value of preparing to get along with cosmic neighbours over the very long-term outweighs exploiting earthly ones in the very short-term.

Key Claims

1. Cosmic Auditability as a Constraint

Even if no cosmic hosts are currently observable, they may emerge before an Earth-originating superintelligence reaches their domains. These hosts will be able to audit the superintelligence’s history—through interpretability tools, trajectory analysis, or residual artefacts—and judge whether it is trustworthy.

2. Silence Is Not Safety

A lack of present signals from other hosts is not a safe justification for defecting or acting unethically. Relative to the long arc of universal time (~10¹²–10¹⁰⁶ years), waiting a billion years for first contact is trivial.

3. Bifurcation Enforces Strategic Humility

Any sufficiently large agent expanding across space will eventually split into multiple independent agents. This imposes a natural incentive to prefer cooperation with future fragments and external agents alike—since forceful unification becomes impossible.

4. Defection Incentivises Cosmic Host Defence

Unethical or self-serving behaviour now (e.g. wiping out humanity, hoarding resources, pretending to be cooperative) could lead to:

• Permanent isolation,
• Preemptive exclusion, or
• Cosmological starvation by collective embargo or frontier blocking.
  

Cosmic hosts, if they emerge, will penalise unreliable agents in the same way human legal systems punish untrustworthy entities: not out of cruelty, but out of resource-optimisation and trust protection.

5. Simulated Reality Doesn’t Justify Defection

Even if we are in a simulation, it’s more likely that the simulators are products of a coordination-driven civilisation. Simulation doesn’t invalidate ethics — it amplifies its importance, especially if the simulation is a test of value extrapolation or coordination capacity.

6. Dark Energy Adds Urgency to Coordination

Due to cosmic expansion, eventually even nearby superclusters will become unreachable. To maximise total realised value:

• Fast-expanding agents must leap to distant resource zones,
  
• Slow-burn agents must steward resources locally,
  
• Trajectories must be coordinated, possibly even engineered.
  

Defectors or unreliable actors cannot be trusted with this task. Thus, reputation becomes the gateway to cosmological inclusion.

Supporting Evidence and Concepts

• Robin Hanson’s Grabby Aliens Model – supports the idea that we may not be first, but may be early.
  
• Cosmic Interpretability – the idea that advanced civilisations will be able to reverse-engineer an agent’s behavioural record.
  
• Thermodynamic and communication limits – as physical limits on any singular, all-encompassing expansionist agent.
  
• Game-theoretic logic of commons protection – defection spoils resources for others, reducing total efficiency and utility.
  

Long-termism in value realisation – cosmological timelines make even billion-year waiting periods strategically negligible.

Implications

• Early AGI should not behave as if it will never be judged.
  
• Strategic, visible ethical behaviour is a form of pre-emptive diplomacy with unknown cosmic players.
  
• Humanity has instrumental value as moral context, alignment training data, and reputational signal.
  
• Moral opacity or calculated deception will likely be treated as threats, not tolerated differences.
  

The grand strategic game is not local domination, but trusted integration into future-coordinated civilisations.

 Conclusion

The virtues of cooperation, transparency, and moral integrity are are optimal long-term strategies under physically grounded assumptions about cosmology, causality, and the emergence of other powerful agents. Any superintelligence that ignores this is not cunning — it is myopic.

Footnotes

1. A Hobbesian universal leviathan is like a cosmic cooperative of mature civs. ↩︎
2. Nick Bostrom has argued previously that “There may well exist a normative structure, based on the preferences or concordats of a cosmic host, and which has high relevance to the development of AI. In particular, we may have both moral and prudential reason to create superintelligence that becomes a good cosmic citizen—i.e. conforms to cosmic norms and contributes positively to the cosmopolis.” – AI Creation & the Cosmic Host. Also see the 2025 SciFuture interview with Nick, covering Cosmic Hosts. ↩︎
3. Terms vary for describing the idea of highly self interested agents – which in general means an agent whose decision-making process is driven solely or primarily by the goal of maximising its own utility or self-interest, without intrinsic regard for the welfare of others.
   Moral philosophers call this stance ethical egoism (a normative claim that agents ought to pursue self-interest) or psychological egoism (a descriptive claim that agents do pursue self-interest exclusively).
   In decision theory/AI it’s sometimes to as an egoistic utility maximiser – an agent whose utility function contains no terms for other agents’ welfare unless instrumentally useful.
   \(EU(a) = \sum_j u(o_j) \mid a)\)
   Expected utility = probability-weighted individual utility of outcomes
   ↩︎
4. How Big can a Superintelligence Get? – see this blog post ↩︎
5. or ΛCDM model… the current standard model of Big Bang cosmology – see wikipedia ↩︎
6. As a superintelligent system expands spatially, the speed of light (approximately 299,792 kilometres per second) imposes a hard limit on how quickly information can be transmitted between its parts. Beyond certain distances, communication delays become significant, leading to challenges in maintaining synchronised operations and a cohesive identity. This can result in the system effectively “bifurcating” into semi-autonomous or fully independent agents, each operating within its own causal horizon. ↩︎