I really enjoyed the article, but I think your argument falls down in the following way:
1) Fission / fusion are the best energy sources we know of, but we can’t yet do it for all forms of matter
2) A sufficiently clever and motivated intelligence probably could do it for all forms of matter, because it looks to be thermodynamically possible
3) (Implicit premise) In between now and the creation of a galaxy-hopping superintelligence with the physical nouse to fusion / fission at least the majority of matter in its path, there will be no more efficient forms of energy discovered
4) Therefore paperclips (or at least something that looks enough like paperclips that we needn’t argue)
Premise 1 is trivialy true, premise 2 has just enough wild speculation to make it plausible but still exciting, and the conclusion is supported if premise 3 is true. But premise 3 looks pretty shakey to me—we can already extract energy from the quantum foam and can at least theoretically extract energy from matter-antimatter collision (although I don’t know if thermodynamics permits either of these methods to be more efficient than fusion). It is a bold judgement to suppose we are at the limits of our understanding of these processes, and bolder still to assume there are no further processes to discover.
I really enjoyed the article, but I think your argument falls down in the following way:
1) Fission / fusion are the best energy sources we know of, but we can’t yet do it for all forms of matter
2) A sufficiently clever and motivated intelligence probably could do it for all forms of matter, because it looks to be thermodynamically possible
3) (Implicit premise) In between now and the creation of a galaxy-hopping superintelligence with the physical nouse to fusion / fission at least the majority of matter in its path, there will be no more efficient forms of energy discovered
4) Therefore paperclips (or at least something that looks enough like paperclips that we needn’t argue)
Premise 1 is trivialy true, premise 2 has just enough wild speculation to make it plausible but still exciting, and the conclusion is supported if premise 3 is true. But premise 3 looks pretty shakey to me—we can already extract energy from the quantum foam and can at least theoretically extract energy from matter-antimatter collision (although I don’t know if thermodynamics permits either of these methods to be more efficient than fusion). It is a bold judgement to suppose we are at the limits of our understanding of these processes, and bolder still to assume there are no further processes to discover.