In order to supplant organic life, nanobots would have to either surpass it in carnot efficiency or (more likely) use a source of negative entropy thus far untapped.
Efficiency leads to victory only if violence is not an option. Animals are terrible at photosynthesis but survive anyways by taking resources from plants.
A species can invade and dominate an ecosystem by using a strategy that has no current counter. It doesn’t need to be efficient. Intelligence allows for playing this game faster than organisms bound by evolution. Humans can make vaccines to fight the spread of a virus despite viruses being one of the fastest adapting threats.
Green goo is plausible not because it would necessarily be more efficient but because it would be using a strategy the existing ecosystem has no defenses to (IE:it’s an invasive species).
Likewise AGI that wants to kill all humans could win even if it required 100x more energy per human equivalent instance if it can execute strategies we can’t counter. Just being able to copy itself and work with the copies is plausibly enough to allow world takeover with enough scaling.
Likewise AGI that wants to kill all humans could win even if it required 100x more energy per human equivalent instance if it can execute strategies we can’t counter. Just being able to copy itself and work with the copies is plausibly enough to allow world takeover with enough scaling.
We haven’t done that against ants, even though the difference is way more then 100x.
If we wanted to kill the ants or almost any other organism in nature we mostly have good enough biotech. For anything biotech can’t kill, manipulate the environment to kill them all.
Why haven’t we? Humans are not sufficiently unified+motivated+advanced to do all these things to ants or other bio life. Some of them are even useful to us. If we sterilized the planet we wouldn’t have trees to cut down for wood.
Ants specifically are easy.
Gene drives allow for targeted elimination of a species. Carpet bomb their gene pool with replicating selfish genes. That’s if an engineered pathogen isn’t enough. Biotech will only get better.
What about bacteria living deep underground? We haven’t exterminated all the bacteria in hard to reach places so humans are safe. That’s a tenuous but logical extension to your argument.
If biotech is not enough, shape the environment so they can’t survive in it. Trees don’t do well in a desert. If we spent the next hundred years adapting current industry to space and building enormous mirrors we can barbecue the planet. It would take time, but that would be the end of all earth based biological life.
Efficiency leads to victory only if violence is not an option. Animals are terrible at photosynthesis but survive anyways by taking resources from plants.
A species can invade and dominate an ecosystem by using a strategy that has no current counter. It doesn’t need to be efficient. Intelligence allows for playing this game faster than organisms bound by evolution. Humans can make vaccines to fight the spread of a virus despite viruses being one of the fastest adapting threats.
Green goo is plausible not because it would necessarily be more efficient but because it would be using a strategy the existing ecosystem has no defenses to (IE:it’s an invasive species).
Likewise AGI that wants to kill all humans could win even if it required 100x more energy per human equivalent instance if it can execute strategies we can’t counter. Just being able to copy itself and work with the copies is plausibly enough to allow world takeover with enough scaling.
Of course! The way I think of it, violence would be using other lifeforms as sources of negentropy.
I like the invasive species argument, I agree that we would be very vulnreable to an engineered pathogen.
We haven’t done that against ants, even though the difference is way more then 100x.
We do have world takeover compared to ants, though our desire to wipe out all ants is just not that high.
Not really? Ants have more biomass then humans, and are likely to outlast us.
If we wanted to kill the ants or almost any other organism in nature we mostly have good enough biotech. For anything biotech can’t kill, manipulate the environment to kill them all.
Why haven’t we? Humans are not sufficiently unified+motivated+advanced to do all these things to ants or other bio life. Some of them are even useful to us. If we sterilized the planet we wouldn’t have trees to cut down for wood.
Ants specifically are easy.
Gene drives allow for targeted elimination of a species. Carpet bomb their gene pool with replicating selfish genes. That’s if an engineered pathogen isn’t enough. Biotech will only get better.
What about bacteria living deep underground? We haven’t exterminated all the bacteria in hard to reach places so humans are safe. That’s a tenuous but logical extension to your argument.
If biotech is not enough, shape the environment so they can’t survive in it. Trees don’t do well in a desert. If we spent the next hundred years adapting current industry to space and building enormous mirrors we can barbecue the planet. It would take time, but that would be the end of all earth based biological life.