You might already have addressed this, but it seems to me that you have an underlying assumption that potential intelligence/optimization power is unbounded. Given what we currently know of the rules of the universe: the speed of light, the second law of thermodynamics, Amdahl’s law etc., this does not seem at all obvious to me.
Of course, the true upper limit might be much higher than current human intelligence But if there exists any upper bound, it should influence the “FOOM”-scenario. Then 30 minutes head start would only mean arriving at the upper bound 30 minutes earlier.
If a self-replicating microbot has the same computing power as a 2020 computer chip half its size, and if it can get energy from sugar/oil while transforming soil into copies of itself, modular mobile supercomputers of staggering ability could be built from these machines very quickly at extremely low cost. Due to Amdahl’s law and the rise of GP-GPUs, not to mention deep learning, there has already been a lot of research into parallelizing various tasks that were once done serially, and this can be expected to continue.
But also, I would guess that a self-replicating nanofabricator that can build arbitrary molecules at the atomic scale will have the ability to produce computer chips that are much more efficient than today’s chips because it will be able to create smaller features. It should also be possible to decrease power consumption by building more efficient transistors. And IIUC quantum physics doesn’t put any bound on the amount of computation that can be performed with a unit of energy, so there’s lots of room for improvement there too.
You might already have addressed this, but it seems to me that you have an underlying assumption that potential intelligence/optimization power is unbounded. Given what we currently know of the rules of the universe: the speed of light, the second law of thermodynamics, Amdahl’s law etc., this does not seem at all obvious to me.
Of course, the true upper limit might be much higher than current human intelligence But if there exists any upper bound, it should influence the “FOOM”-scenario. Then 30 minutes head start would only mean arriving at the upper bound 30 minutes earlier.
If a self-replicating microbot has the same computing power as a 2020 computer chip half its size, and if it can get energy from sugar/oil while transforming soil into copies of itself, modular mobile supercomputers of staggering ability could be built from these machines very quickly at extremely low cost. Due to Amdahl’s law and the rise of GP-GPUs, not to mention deep learning, there has already been a lot of research into parallelizing various tasks that were once done serially, and this can be expected to continue.
But also, I would guess that a self-replicating nanofabricator that can build arbitrary molecules at the atomic scale will have the ability to produce computer chips that are much more efficient than today’s chips because it will be able to create smaller features. It should also be possible to decrease power consumption by building more efficient transistors. And IIUC quantum physics doesn’t put any bound on the amount of computation that can be performed with a unit of energy, so there’s lots of room for improvement there too.