The question I’m most interested right now is, conditioned on this being a real scientific breakthrough in materials science and superconductivity, what are the biggest barriers and bottlenecks (regulatory, technical, economic, inputs) to actually making and scaling productive economic use of the new tech?
Well for starters, if it were only as difficult as graphene to manufacture in quantity, ambient condition superconductors would not see use yet. You would need better robots to mass manufacture them, and current robots are too expensive, and you’re right back to needing a fairly powerful level of AGI or you can’t use it.
Your next problem is ok, you can save 6% or more on long distance power transmission. But it costs an enormous amount of human labor to replace all your wires. See the above case. If merely humans have to do it, it could take 50 years.
There’s the possibility of new forms of compute elements, such as new forms of transistor. The crippling problem here is the way all technology is easiest to evolve from a pre-existing lineage, and it is very difficult to start fresh.
For example, I am sure you have read over the years how graphene or diamond might prove a superior substrate to silicon. Why don’t we see it used for our computer chips? The simplest reasons is that you’d be starting over. The first ICs on this process would be similar 1970s densities. The ‘catch up’ would go much faster than it did, but it still would take years, probably decades, meanwhile silicon is still improving. See how OLEDs still have not replaced LCD based displays despite being outright superior in most metrics.
Same would apply with fundamentally superior superconductor based ICs. At a minimum you’re starting over. Worst case, lithography processes may not work and you may need nanotechnology to actually efficiently construct these structures, if they are in fact superconducting in ambient conditions. To unlock nanotechnology you need to do a lot of experiments, and you need a lot of compute, and if you don’t want it to take 50 years you need some way to process all the data and choose the next experiment and we’re right back to wanting ASI.
Finally I might point out that while I sympathize with your desire—to not see everyone die from runway superintelligence—it’s simply orthogonal. There’s very few possible breakthroughs we could have that would suddenly make AGI/ASI not something worth investing in heavily. Breakthroughs like this one that would potentially make AGI/ASI slightly cheaper to build and robots even better actually causes there to be more potential ROI from investments in AGI. I can’t really think of any to be honest except some science fiction device that allows someone to receive data from our future, and with that data, avoid futures where we all die.
Well for starters, if it were only as difficult as graphene to manufacture in quantity, ambient condition superconductors would not see use yet. You would need better robots to mass manufacture them, and current robots are too expensive, and you’re right back to needing a fairly powerful level of AGI or you can’t use it.
Your next problem is ok, you can save 6% or more on long distance power transmission. But it costs an enormous amount of human labor to replace all your wires. See the above case. If merely humans have to do it, it could take 50 years.
There’s the possibility of new forms of compute elements, such as new forms of transistor. The crippling problem here is the way all technology is easiest to evolve from a pre-existing lineage, and it is very difficult to start fresh.
For example, I am sure you have read over the years how graphene or diamond might prove a superior substrate to silicon. Why don’t we see it used for our computer chips? The simplest reasons is that you’d be starting over. The first ICs on this process would be similar 1970s densities. The ‘catch up’ would go much faster than it did, but it still would take years, probably decades, meanwhile silicon is still improving. See how OLEDs still have not replaced LCD based displays despite being outright superior in most metrics.
Same would apply with fundamentally superior superconductor based ICs. At a minimum you’re starting over. Worst case, lithography processes may not work and you may need nanotechnology to actually efficiently construct these structures, if they are in fact superconducting in ambient conditions. To unlock nanotechnology you need to do a lot of experiments, and you need a lot of compute, and if you don’t want it to take 50 years you need some way to process all the data and choose the next experiment and we’re right back to wanting ASI.
Finally I might point out that while I sympathize with your desire—to not see everyone die from runway superintelligence—it’s simply orthogonal. There’s very few possible breakthroughs we could have that would suddenly make AGI/ASI not something worth investing in heavily. Breakthroughs like this one that would potentially make AGI/ASI slightly cheaper to build and robots even better actually causes there to be more potential ROI from investments in AGI. I can’t really think of any to be honest except some science fiction device that allows someone to receive data from our future, and with that data, avoid futures where we all die.