Yes, I understand what “exponential complexity” means :-)
It sounds, then, like you’re on the side of kalla724 and myself (and against my Devil’s Advocate persona): the AI would not be able to develop nanotechnology (or any other world-shattering technology) without performing physical experiments out in meatspace. It could do so in theory, but in practice, the computational requirements are too high.
But this puts severe constraints on the speed with which the AI’s intelligence explosion could occur. Once it hits the limits of existing technology, it will have to take a long slog through empirical science, at human-grade speeds.
Actually, I don’t know that this means it has to perform physical experiments in order to develop nanotechnology. It is quite conceivable that all the necessary information is already out there, but we haven’t been able to connect all the dots just yet.
At some point the AI hits a wall in the knowledge it can gain without physical experiments, but there’s no good way to know how far ahead that wall is.
It is quite conceivable that all the necessary information is already out there, but we haven’t been able to connect all the dots just yet.
Wouldn’t this mean that creating fully functional self-replicating nanotechnology is just a matter of performing some thorough interdisciplinary studies (or meta-studies or whatever they are called) ? My impression was that there are currently several well-understood—yet unresolved—problems that prevent nanofactories from becoming a reality, though I could be wrong.
The way I see it, there’s no evidence that these problems require additional experimentation to resolve, rather than find an obscure piece of experimentation that has already taken place and whose relevance may not be immediately obvious.
Sure, that more experimentation is needed is probable; but by no means certain.
Thorough interdisciplinary studies may or may not lead to nanotechnology, but they’re fairly certain to lead to something new. While there are a fair number of (say) marine biologists out there, and a fair number of astronomers, there are probably rather few people who have expertise in both fields; and it’s possible that there exists some obscure unsolved problem in marine biology whose solution is obvious to someone who’s keeping up on the forefront of astronomy research. Or vice versa.
Or substitute in any other two fields of your choice.
Yes, I understand what “exponential complexity” means :-)
It sounds, then, like you’re on the side of kalla724 and myself (and against my Devil’s Advocate persona): the AI would not be able to develop nanotechnology (or any other world-shattering technology) without performing physical experiments out in meatspace. It could do so in theory, but in practice, the computational requirements are too high.
But this puts severe constraints on the speed with which the AI’s intelligence explosion could occur. Once it hits the limits of existing technology, it will have to take a long slog through empirical science, at human-grade speeds.
Actually, I don’t know that this means it has to perform physical experiments in order to develop nanotechnology. It is quite conceivable that all the necessary information is already out there, but we haven’t been able to connect all the dots just yet.
At some point the AI hits a wall in the knowledge it can gain without physical experiments, but there’s no good way to know how far ahead that wall is.
Wouldn’t this mean that creating fully functional self-replicating nanotechnology is just a matter of performing some thorough interdisciplinary studies (or meta-studies or whatever they are called) ? My impression was that there are currently several well-understood—yet unresolved—problems that prevent nanofactories from becoming a reality, though I could be wrong.
The way I see it, there’s no evidence that these problems require additional experimentation to resolve, rather than find an obscure piece of experimentation that has already taken place and whose relevance may not be immediately obvious.
Sure, that more experimentation is needed is probable; but by no means certain.
Thorough interdisciplinary studies may or may not lead to nanotechnology, but they’re fairly certain to lead to something new. While there are a fair number of (say) marine biologists out there, and a fair number of astronomers, there are probably rather few people who have expertise in both fields; and it’s possible that there exists some obscure unsolved problem in marine biology whose solution is obvious to someone who’s keeping up on the forefront of astronomy research. Or vice versa.
Or substitute in any other two fields of your choice.