Then, in my lower-bound concretely-visualized strategy for how I would do it, the AI either proliferates or activates already-proliferated tiny diamondoid bacteria and everybody immediately falls over dead during the same 1-second period
Dumb question: how do you get some substance into every human’s body within the same 1 second period? Aren’t a bunch of people e.g. in the middle of some national park, away from convenient air vents? Is the substance somehow everywhere in the atmosphere all at once?
(I wouldn’t normally ask these sorts of questions since I’d bet “some AI kills all humans within a short enough period that we can’t do anything” is possible, but this was described as “concretely-visualized” and I can’t concretely visualize it, even modulo not knowing what a “diamondoid bacteria” is or why the bacterium should be diamondoid.)
how do you get some substance into every human’s body within the same 1 second period? Aren’t a bunch of people e.g. in the middle of some national park, away from convenient air vents? Is the substance somehow everywhere in the atmosphere all at once?
I think the intended visualization is simply that you create a very small self-replicating machine, and have it replicate enough times in the atmosphere that every human-sized organism on the planet will on average contain many copies of it.
One of my co-workers at MIRI comments:
(further conjunctive detail for visualizer-plausibility: most of your replication time is in all the doublings before the last doubling, and in particular you can make a shitload in a pretty small space before launching it into the jet stream to disperse. the jet stream can be used to disperse stuff throughout the atmosphere (and it can use solar radiation, at least, to keep reproducing). it could in principle be powered and do minor amounts of steering.
example things the [AGI] who has no better plan than this paltry human-conceivable plan has to think about are “how does the time-cost of making sure [I hit the people] at the south pole base and [on] all the cruise liners and in all the nuclear submarines, trade off against the risk-cost of leaving that fragment of humanity alive”, etc.)
Dumb question: how do you get some substance into every human’s body within the same 1 second period? Aren’t a bunch of people e.g. in the middle of some national park, away from convenient air vents? Is the substance somehow everywhere in the atmosphere all at once?
(I wouldn’t normally ask these sorts of questions since I’d bet “some AI kills all humans within a short enough period that we can’t do anything” is possible, but this was described as “concretely-visualized” and I can’t concretely visualize it, even modulo not knowing what a “diamondoid bacteria” is or why the bacterium should be diamondoid.)
Also: what is a diamondoid bacterium?
I think the intended visualization is simply that you create a very small self-replicating machine, and have it replicate enough times in the atmosphere that every human-sized organism on the planet will on average contain many copies of it.
One of my co-workers at MIRI comments:
Regarding the idea of diamondoid nanotechnology, Drexler’s Nanosystems and http://www.molecularassembler.com/Nanofactory/index.htm talk about the general concept.
Ah, that makes sense—thanks!