As a historical note and for further context, the diamondoid scenario is at least ~10 years old, outlined here by Eliezer, just not with the term “diamondoid bacteria”:
The concrete illustration I often use is that a superintelligence asks itself what the fastest possible route is to increasing its real-world power, and then, rather than bothering with the digital counters that humans call money, the superintelligence solves the protein structure prediction problem, emails some DNA sequences to online peptide synthesis labs, and gets back a batch of proteins which it can mix together to create an acoustically controlled equivalent of an artificial ribosome which it can use to make second-stage nanotechnology which manufactures third-stage nanotechnology which manufactures diamondoid molecular nanotechnology and then… well, it doesn’t really matter from our perspective what comes after that, because from a human perspective any technology more advanced than molecular nanotech is just overkill. A superintelligence with molecular nanotech does not wait for you to buy things from it in order for it to acquire money. It just moves atoms around into whatever molecular structures or large-scale structures it wants.
The first mention of “diamondoid” on LW (and by Eliezer) is this from 16 years ago, but not for an AI doom scenario.
As a historical note and for further context, the diamondoid scenario is at least ~10 years old, outlined here by Eliezer, just not with the term “diamondoid bacteria”:
The first mention of “diamondoid” on LW (and by Eliezer) is this from 16 years ago, but not for an AI doom scenario.