I would be extremely surprised if a superintelligence doesn’t devise physical capabilities that are beyond science fiction and go some way into fantasy. I don’t expect them to be literally omnipotent, but at least have Clarkean “sufficiently advanced technology”. We may recognise some of its limits, or we may not.
“Computronium” just means an arrangement of matter that does the most effective computation possible given the constraints of physical law with available resources. It seems reasonable to suppose that technology created by a superintelligence could approach that.
Bootstrapped nano-factories are possible with known physics, and biology already does most of it. We just can’t do the engineering to generalize it to things we want. To suppose that a superintelligence can’t do the engineering either seems much less justified than supposing that it can.
The rest are far more speculative, but I don’t think any of them can be completely ruled out. I agree that the likelihood on any single one of these is tiny, but disagree in that I expect the aggregate of “capabilities that are near omnipotent by our standards” to be highly likely.
I posit that we’ve imagined basically everything available with known physics, and extended into theoretical physics. We don’t need to capitulate to the ineffable of a superintelligence, known + theoretical capabilities already suffice to absolutely dominate if managed by an extremely competent entity.
I would be extremely surprised if a superintelligence doesn’t devise physical capabilities that are beyond science fiction and go some way into fantasy. I don’t expect them to be literally omnipotent, but at least have Clarkean “sufficiently advanced technology”. We may recognise some of its limits, or we may not.
“Computronium” just means an arrangement of matter that does the most effective computation possible given the constraints of physical law with available resources. It seems reasonable to suppose that technology created by a superintelligence could approach that.
Bootstrapped nano-factories are possible with known physics, and biology already does most of it. We just can’t do the engineering to generalize it to things we want. To suppose that a superintelligence can’t do the engineering either seems much less justified than supposing that it can.
The rest are far more speculative, but I don’t think any of them can be completely ruled out. I agree that the likelihood on any single one of these is tiny, but disagree in that I expect the aggregate of “capabilities that are near omnipotent by our standards” to be highly likely.
I posit that we’ve imagined basically everything available with known physics, and extended into theoretical physics. We don’t need to capitulate to the ineffable of a superintelligence, known + theoretical capabilities already suffice to absolutely dominate if managed by an extremely competent entity.