Suppose I send a few lines of code to a remote server. Those lines are enough to bootstrap a superintelligence which goes on to strongly optimize every aspect of the world. This counts as a fairly small amount of optimization power, as the chance of me landing on those lines of code by pure chance isn’t that small.
Correct, though note that this doesn’t let you pick a specific optimization target for that AGI. You’d need more bits in order to specify an optimization target. In other words, there’s still a meaningful sense in which you can’t “steer” the world into a specific target other than one it was likely to hit anyway, at least not without more bits.
Suppose I send a few lines of code to a remote server. Those lines are enough to bootstrap a superintelligence which goes on to strongly optimize every aspect of the world. This counts as a fairly small amount of optimization power, as the chance of me landing on those lines of code by pure chance isn’t that small.
Correct, though note that this doesn’t let you pick a specific optimization target for that AGI. You’d need more bits in order to specify an optimization target. In other words, there’s still a meaningful sense in which you can’t “steer” the world into a specific target other than one it was likely to hit anyway, at least not without more bits.