I think you are overindexing on current state of affairs in two ways.
First, “we should not pave all the nature with human-made stuff” is a relatively new cultural trend. In High Modernism era there were unironic projects of cutting down Amazon forests and making here corn fields, or killing all animals so they won’t suffer, etc.
Second, actually, in current reality, there are not many things we can do efficiently with ants? We can pave every anthill with solar panels, but there are cheaper places to do that and we don’t produce that many solar panels, yet, and we don’t have that much demand for electricity, yet.
For superintelligence, calculus is quite different. Anthill is large pile of carbon and silicon, and both parts can be used in computations, and superintelligence can afford enough automatization to pick them up. Superintelligent economy has lower bound on growth 33% per year, which means that it’s going to reach $1 per atom of our solar system in less than 300 years—there will be plenty of demand for turning anthills into compute. Technological progress increases number of things you can do efficiently and shifts balance from “leave as it is” to “remake entirely”.
At some point of our development, we are going to be able to disasseble Earth and get immense benefits. We can choose to not do that, because we value Earth as our home. It’s rather likely that superintelligences are not going to share our sentiments.
“Technological progress increases number of things you can do efficiently and shifts balance from “leave as it is” to “remake entirely”.
Technological progress may actual help you pinpoint more precisely what situations you want to pay attention to. I don’t have any reason to believe a wiser powerful being would touch every atom in the universe.
I think you are overindexing on current state of affairs in two ways.
First, “we should not pave all the nature with human-made stuff” is a relatively new cultural trend. In High Modernism era there were unironic projects of cutting down Amazon forests and making here corn fields, or killing all animals so they won’t suffer, etc.
Second, actually, in current reality, there are not many things we can do efficiently with ants? We can pave every anthill with solar panels, but there are cheaper places to do that and we don’t produce that many solar panels, yet, and we don’t have that much demand for electricity, yet.
For superintelligence, calculus is quite different. Anthill is large pile of carbon and silicon, and both parts can be used in computations, and superintelligence can afford enough automatization to pick them up. Superintelligent economy has lower bound on growth 33% per year, which means that it’s going to reach $1 per atom of our solar system in less than 300 years—there will be plenty of demand for turning anthills into compute. Technological progress increases number of things you can do efficiently and shifts balance from “leave as it is” to “remake entirely”.
At some point of our development, we are going to be able to disasseble Earth and get immense benefits. We can choose to not do that, because we value Earth as our home. It’s rather likely that superintelligences are not going to share our sentiments.
I guess I don’t think this is true:
“Technological progress increases number of things you can do efficiently and shifts balance from “leave as it is” to “remake entirely”.
Technological progress may actual help you pinpoint more precisely what situations you want to pay attention to. I don’t have any reason to believe a wiser powerful being would touch every atom in the universe.