The “Warring nanobots in the upper atmosphere” thing doesn’t actually make sense.
The zaps of light are diffraction limited. And targeting at that distance is hard. Partly because it’s hard to tell between an actual animal and a bunch of nanobots pretending to be an animal. So you can’t zap the nanobots on the ground without making the ground uninhabitable for humans.
The “California red tape” thing implies some alignment strategy that stuck the AI to obey the law, and didn’t go too insanely wrong despite a superintelligence looking for loopholes (Eg the social persuasion infrastructure is already there. Convince humans that dyson sphere are pretty and don’t block the view?).
There is also no clear explanation of why someone somewhere doesn’t make a non-red-taped AI.
You have restored my faith in LessWrong! I was getting worried that despite 200+ karma and 20+ comments, no one had actually nitpicked the descriptions of what actually happens.
The zaps of light are diffraction limited.
In practice, if you want the atmospheric nanobots to zap stuff, you’ll need to do some complicated mirroring because you need to divert sunlight. And it’s not one contiguous mirror but lots of small ones. But I think we can still model this as basic diffraction with some circular mirror / lens.
Intensity I=ceEπr2, where E is the total power of sunlight falling on the mirror disk, r is the radius of the Airy disk, and ce is an efficiency constant I’ve thrown in (because of things like atmospheric absorption (Claude says, somewhat surprisingly, this shouldn’t be ridiculuously large), and not all the energy in the diffraction pattern being in the Airy disk (about 84% is, says Claude), etc.)
Now, E=π(D2)2L, where D is the diameter of the mirror configuration, L is the solar irradiance. And r=θl, where l is the focal length (distance from mirror to target), and θ≈1.22λ/D the angular size of the central spot.
So we have I≈ceLD41.222×4λ2l2, so the required mirror configuration radius D=4√1.222×4Iλ2l2ceL.
Plugging in some reasonable values like λ≈5×10−7 m (average incoming sunlight—yes the concentration suffers a bit because it’s not all this wavelength), I=107 W/m^2 (the level of an industrial laser that can cut metal), l=104 m (lower stratosphere), L=1361 W/m^2 (solar irradiance), and a conservative guess that 99% of power is wasted so ce=0.01, we get D≈18m (and the resulting beam is about 3mm wide).
So a few dozen metres of upper atmosphere nanobots should actually give you a pretty ridiculous concentration of power!
(I did not know this when I wrote the story; I am quite surprised the required radius is this ridiculously tiny. But I had heard of the concept of a “weather machine” like this from the book Where is my flying car?, which I’ve reviewed here, which suggests that this is possible.)
Partly because it’s hard to tell between an actual animal and a bunch of nanobots pretending to be an animal. So you can’t zap the nanobots on the ground without making the ground uninhabitable for humans.
I don’t really buy this, why is it obvious the nanobots could pretend to be an animal so well that it’s indistinguishable? Or why would targeted zaps have bad side-effects?
The “California red tape” thing implies some alignment strategy that stuck the AI to obey the law, and didn’t go too insanely wrong despite a superintelligence looking for loopholes
Yeah, successful alignment to legal compliance was established without any real justification halfway through. (How to do this is currently an open technical problem, which, alas, I did not manage to solve for my satirical short story.)
Convince humans that dyson sphere are pretty and don’t block the view?
This is a good point, especially since high levels of emotional manipulation was an established in-universe AI capability. (The issue described with the Dyson sphere was less that it itself would block the view, and more that building it would require dismantling the planets in a way that ruins the view—though now I’m realising that “if the sun on Earth is blocked, all Earthly views are gone” is a simpler reason and removes the need for building anything on the other planets at all.)
There is also no clear explanation of why someone somewhere doesn’t make a non-red-taped AI.
why is it obvious the nanobots could pretend to be an animal so well that it’s indistinguishable?
These nanobots are in the upper atmosphere, possibly with clouds in the way, and the nanobot fake humans could be any human to nanobot ratio. Nanobot internals except human skin and muscles. Or just a human with a few nanobots in their blood.
Or why would targeted zaps have bad side-effects?
Because nanobots can be like a bacteria if they want. Tiny and everywhere. The nanobots can be hiding under leaves, cloths, skin, roofs etc. And even if they weren’t, a single nanobot is a tiny target. Most of the energy of the zap can’t hit a single nanobot. Any zap of light that can stop nanobots in your house needs to be powerful enough to burn a hole in your roof.
And even if the zap isn’t huge, it’s not 1 or 2 zapps, it’s loads of zapps constantly.
The “Warring nanobots in the upper atmosphere” thing doesn’t actually make sense.
The zaps of light are diffraction limited. And targeting at that distance is hard. Partly because it’s hard to tell between an actual animal and a bunch of nanobots pretending to be an animal. So you can’t zap the nanobots on the ground without making the ground uninhabitable for humans.
The “California red tape” thing implies some alignment strategy that stuck the AI to obey the law, and didn’t go too insanely wrong despite a superintelligence looking for loopholes (Eg the social persuasion infrastructure is already there. Convince humans that dyson sphere are pretty and don’t block the view?).
There is also no clear explanation of why someone somewhere doesn’t make a non-red-taped AI.
You have restored my faith in LessWrong! I was getting worried that despite 200+ karma and 20+ comments, no one had actually nitpicked the descriptions of what actually happens.
In practice, if you want the atmospheric nanobots to zap stuff, you’ll need to do some complicated mirroring because you need to divert sunlight. And it’s not one contiguous mirror but lots of small ones. But I think we can still model this as basic diffraction with some circular mirror / lens.
Intensity I=ceEπr2, where E is the total power of sunlight falling on the mirror disk, r is the radius of the Airy disk, and ce is an efficiency constant I’ve thrown in (because of things like atmospheric absorption (Claude says, somewhat surprisingly, this shouldn’t be ridiculuously large), and not all the energy in the diffraction pattern being in the Airy disk (about 84% is, says Claude), etc.)
Now, E=π(D2)2L, where D is the diameter of the mirror configuration, L is the solar irradiance. And r=θl, where l is the focal length (distance from mirror to target), and θ≈1.22λ/D the angular size of the central spot.
So we have I≈ceLD41.222×4λ2l2, so the required mirror configuration radius D=4√1.222×4Iλ2l2ceL.
Plugging in some reasonable values like λ≈5×10−7 m (average incoming sunlight—yes the concentration suffers a bit because it’s not all this wavelength), I=107 W/m^2 (the level of an industrial laser that can cut metal), l=104 m (lower stratosphere), L=1361 W/m^2 (solar irradiance), and a conservative guess that 99% of power is wasted so ce=0.01, we get D≈18m (and the resulting beam is about 3mm wide).
So a few dozen metres of upper atmosphere nanobots should actually give you a pretty ridiculous concentration of power!
(I did not know this when I wrote the story; I am quite surprised the required radius is this ridiculously tiny. But I had heard of the concept of a “weather machine” like this from the book Where is my flying car?, which I’ve reviewed here, which suggests that this is possible.)
I don’t really buy this, why is it obvious the nanobots could pretend to be an animal so well that it’s indistinguishable? Or why would targeted zaps have bad side-effects?
Yeah, successful alignment to legal compliance was established without any real justification halfway through. (How to do this is currently an open technical problem, which, alas, I did not manage to solve for my satirical short story.)
This is a good point, especially since high levels of emotional manipulation was an established in-universe AI capability. (The issue described with the Dyson sphere was less that it itself would block the view, and more that building it would require dismantling the planets in a way that ruins the view—though now I’m realising that “if the sun on Earth is blocked, all Earthly views are gone” is a simpler reason and removes the need for building anything on the other planets at all.)
Yep, this is a plot hole.
These nanobots are in the upper atmosphere, possibly with clouds in the way, and the nanobot fake humans could be any human to nanobot ratio. Nanobot internals except human skin and muscles. Or just a human with a few nanobots in their blood.
Because nanobots can be like a bacteria if they want. Tiny and everywhere. The nanobots can be hiding under leaves, cloths, skin, roofs etc. And even if they weren’t, a single nanobot is a tiny target. Most of the energy of the zap can’t hit a single nanobot. Any zap of light that can stop nanobots in your house needs to be powerful enough to burn a hole in your roof.
And even if the zap isn’t huge, it’s not 1 or 2 zapps, it’s loads of zapps constantly.