There is nothing magical about it, so yes—AI will help, but humans are enough. I would expect a sustained, 100s of millions/$1bn 10 year effort would bring us a lot closer to this hardware technological ‘maturity’ (we are not even trying hard now—a mole of carbon-12 has a mass of 12g and it contains 6*10^23 atoms, yet there is nothing stopping us from building small machines with mere thousands/millions of atoms). Obviously you could say that this sort of money would help with anything, but I believe it would be one of the best value/$ projects).
With regards to molecular manufacturing, one could imagine a multitude of ideas that are perfectly feasible from classical physics standpoint yet nowadays are in the realm of sci-fi—examples including humanoid robots built bottom-up (with milliond of tiny motors, moving more majestically than a human), mechanical computers the size of a sugar cube with 10^21 FLOPS and approaching Landauer’s principle (~computronium—https://youtu.be/yVX9Ob4SjGA) or as I mentioned previously, an autogenous replicator which would allow any object to be replicated, including itself (you know what the curve looks like...)
The second example ties with the AI/AGI—you do not have to worry about Moore’s law in the narrow sense, even in terms of FLOPS/$ as current semiconductor substrate in simply a local maximum. Regardless of whether you are in the ‘scaling’ camp or not, more FLOPS would surely help test this hypothesis as well as many others… No one knows the hurdles in front of us, but it would surely ‘help’ to build AGI—obviously in quotation marks given the risks.
There is nothing magical about it, so yes—AI will help, but humans are enough. I would expect a sustained, 100s of millions/$1bn 10 year effort would bring us a lot closer to this hardware technological ‘maturity’ (we are not even trying hard now—a mole of carbon-12 has a mass of 12g and it contains 6*10^23 atoms, yet there is nothing stopping us from building small machines with mere thousands/millions of atoms). Obviously you could say that this sort of money would help with anything, but I believe it would be one of the best value/$ projects).
With regards to molecular manufacturing, one could imagine a multitude of ideas that are perfectly feasible from classical physics standpoint yet nowadays are in the realm of sci-fi—examples including humanoid robots built bottom-up (with milliond of tiny motors, moving more majestically than a human), mechanical computers the size of a sugar cube with 10^21 FLOPS and approaching Landauer’s principle (~computronium—https://youtu.be/yVX9Ob4SjGA) or as I mentioned previously, an autogenous replicator which would allow any object to be replicated, including itself (you know what the curve looks like...)
The second example ties with the AI/AGI—you do not have to worry about Moore’s law in the narrow sense, even in terms of FLOPS/$ as current semiconductor substrate in simply a local maximum. Regardless of whether you are in the ‘scaling’ camp or not, more FLOPS would surely help test this hypothesis as well as many others… No one knows the hurdles in front of us, but it would surely ‘help’ to build AGI—obviously in quotation marks given the risks.