Umm… It’s not like the AI-2027 forecast didn’t account for the possibilities like these. The scenario’s authors just moved them into the collapsible section related to the robot economy’s doubling times. After estimating the doubling time of a humanlike robot economy by making an example out of a car factory which “produces roughly its own weight in cars in less than a year”, they proceed to mention plants and insects which “often have “doubling times” of far less than a year—sometimes just weeks!” or even “a new kind of indigestible algae that spreads across the Earth’s oceans, doubling twice a day so that it covers the entire ocean surface in two months, along with an accompanying ecosystem of predator-species that convert algae into more useful products, themselves fed into floating factories that produce macro-structures like rockets and more floating factories.”
The takeoff forecast has the authors outright complain that “this sort of thing is hard to reason about: our situation is like that of a caveman walking down the beach and into the ocean, noticing that the water gets too deep for him to walk, and then wondering how deep it eventually gets miles away from shore” and having no way to learn whether there is the Mariana trench about 11 km deep...
Fair enough. And perhaps I am misreading, but their mainline scenario does not assume a race to the smallest self replicator. If they are, I will take this post down. Otherwise, I think it has things worth saying. I would fix or add a mention of the dropdown, but I am writing a fiction post and don’t want to spend too much time on this.
Umm… It’s not like the AI-2027 forecast didn’t account for the possibilities like these. The scenario’s authors just moved them into the collapsible section related to the robot economy’s doubling times. After estimating the doubling time of a humanlike robot economy by making an example out of a car factory which “produces roughly its own weight in cars in less than a year”, they proceed to mention plants and insects which “often have “doubling times” of far less than a year—sometimes just weeks!” or even “a new kind of indigestible algae that spreads across the Earth’s oceans, doubling twice a day so that it covers the entire ocean surface in two months, along with an accompanying ecosystem of predator-species that convert algae into more useful products, themselves fed into floating factories that produce macro-structures like rockets and more floating factories.”
The takeoff forecast has the authors outright complain that “this sort of thing is hard to reason about: our situation is like that of a caveman walking down the beach and into the ocean, noticing that the water gets too deep for him to walk, and then wondering how deep it eventually gets miles away from shore” and having no way to learn whether there is the Mariana trench about 11 km deep...
Fair enough. And perhaps I am misreading, but their mainline scenario does not assume a race to the smallest self replicator. If they are, I will take this post down. Otherwise, I think it has things worth saying. I would fix or add a mention of the dropdown, but I am writing a fiction post and don’t want to spend too much time on this.