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On Owning Galaxies — LessWrong

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It seems to be a real view held by serious people that your OpenAI shares will soon be tradable for moons and galaxies. This includes eminent thinkers like Dwarkesh Patel, Leopold Aschenbrenner, perhaps Scott Alexander and many more. According to them, property rights will survive an AI singularity event and soon economic growth is going to make it possible for individuals to own entire galaxies in exchange for some AI stocks. It follows that we should now seriously think through how we can equally distribute those galaxies and make sure that most humans will not end up as the UBI underclass owning mere continents or major planets. I don't think this is a particularly intelligent view. It comes from a huge lack of imagination for the future. People may think that AI causing human extinction is something really strange and specific to happen. But it's the opposite: humans existing is a very brittle and strange state of affairs. Many specific things have to be true for us to be here, and

x On Owning Galaxies — LessWrong AI World Modeling Frontpage 2026 Top Fifty: 8 % 154 On Owning Galaxies by Simon Lermen 6th Jan 2026 Linkpost for simonlermen.substack.com 4 min read 62 154 It seems to be a real view held by serious people that your OpenAI shares will soon be tradable for moons and galaxies. This includes eminent thinkers like Dwarkesh Patel , Leopold Aschenbrenner , perhaps Scott Alexander [1] and many more. According to them, property rights will survive an AI singularity event and soon economic growth is going to make it possible for individuals to own entire galaxies in exc

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