There is no “digital realm” independent of physical infrastructure.

See the discussion in Chapter 5 about how there isn’t a distinct Digital Realm and Material Realm.

Material resources are useful in the pursuit of most goals.

Humans and earlier hominids mostly lived above ground while we were evolving intelligence. We don’t have a lot of built-in drives pointed uniquely at what happens a hundred meters below the surface of the Earth. Yet we ended up building giant pit mines.

Why? Because we want a lot of things that can be made with metal, refined from ore, mined from below the Earth’s surface.

Similarly, although we almost all live near the Earth’s surface, we put satellites into space to transmit internet data.

And although we don’t eat silage — fermented grass — we make quite a lot of silage to feed to cattle that we eat in turn.

Evolution built into hominids no emotions about factories; factories did not exist when our key emotions were evolving. But we have now bent much of our will as a species toward steering into existence factories of one kind or another. And so the chemical plants make plastic, which can be used in other factories to make plastic spoons, that can be shipped to humans who use the spoons to eat the food that the humans actually want.

Which is all to say: The part of the real world that humans care about for its own sake is a thin skin stretched over a much larger world. We don’t need to intrinsically care about the rest of the larger world, or live in every part of it, to skillfully use it for longer-term ends. We don’t need to have been trained by evolution to love copper or silage or factories in order to see their usefulness.

In the same way, an AI may or may not ultimately care about the physical world. But even if it doesn’t inherently care about the physical world, it will still find plenty of value in physical resources. Matter and energy can be used to create more digital substrate, to cool overheating processors, or to launch probes into space to collect even more resources.