I don’t see specifically gray gooey nanobots having a visible presence on LW. When people gesture at nanotech, it’s mostly in the sense of molecular manufacturing, local self-contained infrastructure for producing advanced things like computers, a macroscale activity. This is important for quickly instantiating designs that can’t be constructed on existing infrastructure, bootstrapping molecular manufacturing capability starting from things like existing RNA printers.
This way, bringing new things into physical existence only requires having their designs, given a sufficiently versatile manufacturing toolset. If there is no extended delay with incrementally upgrading production facilities all over the world, ability to design machines thousands of times faster than human civilization directly translates into ability to quickly manufacture them.
(The diamondoid bacterium things Yudkowsky keeps mentioning don’t particularly need self-replication capabilities to make the same point, they could just as well be pumped out by Zerg queens foraging underground. The details of this don’t matter for the point being made, there are many independent ways of eating the world that don’t overall become less effective because some of them are on further reflection infeasible.)
I don’t see specifically gray gooey nanobots having a visible presence on LW. When people gesture at nanotech, it’s mostly in the sense of molecular manufacturing, local self-contained infrastructure for producing advanced things like computers, a macroscale activity. This is important for quickly instantiating designs that can’t be constructed on existing infrastructure, bootstrapping molecular manufacturing capability starting from things like existing RNA printers.
This way, bringing new things into physical existence only requires having their designs, given a sufficiently versatile manufacturing toolset. If there is no extended delay with incrementally upgrading production facilities all over the world, ability to design machines thousands of times faster than human civilization directly translates into ability to quickly manufacture them.
(The diamondoid bacterium things Yudkowsky keeps mentioning don’t particularly need self-replication capabilities to make the same point, they could just as well be pumped out by Zerg queens foraging underground. The details of this don’t matter for the point being made, there are many independent ways of eating the world that don’t overall become less effective because some of them are on further reflection infeasible.)