A fun story. I strongly agree about hardware as a limitation; I’d emphasize specialization especially. For many applications, distributed infrastructure like a botnet or an EC2 cloud can be orders of magnitude less efficient than a purpose-built supercomputer. If the hardware were unique beyond that, that would be an even bigger barrier to escape.
Self-modification with constant hardware is the main caveat.
A fun story. I strongly agree about hardware as a limitation; I’d emphasize specialization especially. For many applications, distributed infrastructure like a botnet or an EC2 cloud can be orders of magnitude less efficient than a purpose-built supercomputer. If the hardware were unique beyond that, that would be an even bigger barrier to escape.
Self-modification with constant hardware is the main caveat.