In this scenario AGIs are unrestricted in their activity, so in particular they can do physical experiments if that turns out to be useful. Manufacturing of improved hardware at scale requires development of physical tools anyway, so it’s a step along the way.
The starting point is likely biotechnology, with enough mastery to design novel organisms. Think drosophila swarms, not whales, but with an option to assemble into whales. With enough energy, this gives both exponential scaling and control at small scale, which is good for a large number of diverse experiments that run very quickly. Macroscale biotechnology replaces human physical infrastructure, both crude manipulation of matter (logistics, assembly) and chemical processing. More subtle objects like chips and fusion plants could be manufactured with specialized non-biological machines, the same way humans do such things, but backed by the exponential biological infrastructure and enough planning to get everything working right away. If diamondoid nanotech turns out to be feasible, this works even better, but it doesn’t have to.
(Of course, this is all under the absolutely impossible assumption of lack of superintelligence. So exploratory engineering, not prediction. A lower bound on what seems feasible, even if it never becomes worthwhile to do in a remotely similar way.)
In this scenario AGIs are unrestricted in their activity, so in particular they can do physical experiments if that turns out to be useful. Manufacturing of improved hardware at scale requires development of physical tools anyway, so it’s a step along the way.
The starting point is likely biotechnology, with enough mastery to design novel organisms. Think drosophila swarms, not whales, but with an option to assemble into whales. With enough energy, this gives both exponential scaling and control at small scale, which is good for a large number of diverse experiments that run very quickly. Macroscale biotechnology replaces human physical infrastructure, both crude manipulation of matter (logistics, assembly) and chemical processing. More subtle objects like chips and fusion plants could be manufactured with specialized non-biological machines, the same way humans do such things, but backed by the exponential biological infrastructure and enough planning to get everything working right away. If diamondoid nanotech turns out to be feasible, this works even better, but it doesn’t have to.
(Of course, this is all under the absolutely impossible assumption of lack of superintelligence. So exploratory engineering, not prediction. A lower bound on what seems feasible, even if it never becomes worthwhile to do in a remotely similar way.)