There is no such thing as cosmophagous AI

Cosmophagous AI (my name for AI that races desperately at near-light speeds to grab that last galaxy, that last star, that last planet before it forever recedes over the cosmological horizon ) is sometimes invoked as a counterargument to the idea that even an ASI that is mostly indifferent to our fate would keep us around if the cost of doing so were sufficiently low. For example, Ryan Greenblatt makes the following point in Notes on fatalities from AI takeover : [T]he costs of keeping physical humans alive are extremely low, probably it only slows the industrial expansion by a small amount (and this slowdown is probably the dominant effect from a resource perspective), probably by less than 1 month and very likely less than 1 year. Delaying this long costs a pretty tiny fraction of long-run cosmic resources, probably well less than one billionth of the resources that will ultimately be accessible to the AIs in aggregate. Thus, extremely small amounts of motivation to keep humans alive could suffice for avoiding large fractions of humans dying due to industrial expansion (depending on the exact preferences of the AI). Writing in the comment section, Tanner Cook counters: Framing th