Transistors can switch states millions to billions of times faster than synaptic connections in the human brain. This would mean that every week, the ASI makes an additional two hundred years of scientific progress. The core reason to expect ASI to win decisively in a conflict, then, is the same as the reason a 21st-century military would decisively defeat an 11th-century one: technological innovation.
This sounds like nonsense. Scientific progress it not linear, or consistently go at the same rate. It’s lumpy and path dependent, certain discoveries can unlock many in rapid succession (eg discovery of quantum mechanics), other times there is stagnation, not because of lack of geniuses but because problems are legitimately hard, lack of tools, a wrong path was taken, etc. Super geniuses also can’t necessarily just churn out new progress their entire life, they will hit roadblocks, and it is not explained why ASI will not either. Super geniuses can also make mistakes, and require peer reviews, I don’t see why an ASI could not sometimes make mistakes either, they aren’t some sort of magic dust. To keep pushing progress forward that fast it would need to make no mistakes and go down no wrong paths on.
Furthermore, scientists can test with specialised equipment, and huge labs, think the large hadron collider. The ASI does does not necessarily have access to this. Even if it can model a great deal, simulation diverges from reality at some point.
The bottleneck of scientific progress often isn’t just “thinking faster” but in reality, the it often the external world, experiments, data gathering, materials, not the firing rate of neurons. Also this is neglecting to touch on how thousands of scientists working together.
This sounds like nonsense. Scientific progress it not linear, or consistently go at the same rate. It’s lumpy and path dependent, certain discoveries can unlock many in rapid succession (eg discovery of quantum mechanics), other times there is stagnation, not because of lack of geniuses but because problems are legitimately hard, lack of tools, a wrong path was taken, etc. Super geniuses also can’t necessarily just churn out new progress their entire life, they will hit roadblocks, and it is not explained why ASI will not either. Super geniuses can also make mistakes, and require peer reviews, I don’t see why an ASI could not sometimes make mistakes either, they aren’t some sort of magic dust. To keep pushing progress forward that fast it would need to make no mistakes and go down no wrong paths on.
Furthermore, scientists can test with specialised equipment, and huge labs, think the large hadron collider. The ASI does does not necessarily have access to this. Even if it can model a great deal, simulation diverges from reality at some point.
The bottleneck of scientific progress often isn’t just “thinking faster” but in reality, the it often the external world, experiments, data gathering, materials, not the firing rate of neurons. Also this is neglecting to touch on how thousands of scientists working together.