This post is making a valid point (the time to intervene to prevent an outcome that would otherwise occur, is going to be before the outcome actually occurs), but I'm annoyed with the mind projection fallacy by which this post seems to treat "point of no return" as a feature of the territory, rather than your planning algorithm's map. (And, incidentally, I wish this dumb robot cult still had a culture that cared about appreciating cognitive algorithms as the common interest of many causes, such that people would find it more natural to write a post about "point of no return"-reasoning as a general rationality topic that could have all sorts of potential applications, rather than the topic specifically being about the special case of the coming robot apocalypse. But it's probably not fair to blame Kokotajlo for this.) The concept of a "point of no return" only makes sense relative to a class of interventions. A 1 kg ball is falling at 9.8 m/s². When is the "point of no return" at which the ball has accelerated enough such that it's no longer possible to stop it from hitting the ground? The problem is underspecified as stated. If we add the additional information that your means of intervening is a net that can only trap objects falling with less than X kg⋅m/s² of force, then we can say that the point of no return happens at X/9.8 seconds. But it would be weird to talk about "the second we ball risk reducers lose the ability to significantly reduce the risk of the ball hitting the ground" as if that were an independent pre-existing fact that we could use to determine how strong of a net we need to buy, because it depends on the net strength.