The thing I mean by “superintelligence” is very different from a government. A government cannot design nanotechnology, and is made of humans which value human things.
The two examples everyone loves to use to demonstrate that massive top-down engineering projects can sometimes be a viable alternative to iterative design (the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program) were both government-led initiatives, rather than single very smart people working alone in their garages. I think it’s reasonable to conclude that governments have considerably more capacity to steer outcomes than individuals, and are the most powerful optimizers that exist at this time.
I think restricting the term “superintelligence” to “only that which can create functional self-replicators with nano-scale components” is misleading. Concretely, that definition of “superintelligence” says that natural selection is superintelligent, while the most capable groups of humans are nowhere close, even with computerized tooling.
A government funded total effort could not design nanotechnology or are you saying because a present day nanotech rush would be accomplished a team of elite scientists and engineers and near future AI tools, it’s not “the government”? (The government being made of elderly leaders and mountains of people who process administrative procedures. Were a nanotech rush to succeed it would be accomplished by a “skunkworks” style effort with nearly unlimited resources)
Just kinda confused, because “the government” has not meaningfully tried in this domain. A true total effort would be at large integrated sites, it would identify potential routes to the goal and fully fund then all in parallel for redundancy. You would see rush built buildings and safety procedures and most federal laws would be waived.
As I understand it, NNI essentially gives separate university labs small grants to work on “nanotechnology” which includes a broad range of topics that are unrelated to the important one of a self replicating molecular assembler.
Presumably a reasonable outside view would be this effort will not develop such an assembler prior to 2100 or later.
If it became known that a rival government had nearly finished a working assembler and was busy developing “kill dust” that can make any human in earth drop dead on command, you would see such an effort.
The thing I mean by “superintelligence” is very different from a government. A government cannot design nanotechnology, and is made of humans which value human things.
The two examples everyone loves to use to demonstrate that massive top-down engineering projects can sometimes be a viable alternative to iterative design (the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program) were both government-led initiatives, rather than single very smart people working alone in their garages. I think it’s reasonable to conclude that governments have considerably more capacity to steer outcomes than individuals, and are the most powerful optimizers that exist at this time.
I think restricting the term “superintelligence” to “only that which can create functional self-replicators with nano-scale components” is misleading. Concretely, that definition of “superintelligence” says that natural selection is superintelligent, while the most capable groups of humans are nowhere close, even with computerized tooling.
A government funded total effort could not design nanotechnology or are you saying because a present day nanotech rush would be accomplished a team of elite scientists and engineers and near future AI tools, it’s not “the government”? (The government being made of elderly leaders and mountains of people who process administrative procedures. Were a nanotech rush to succeed it would be accomplished by a “skunkworks” style effort with nearly unlimited resources)
Just kinda confused, because “the government” has not meaningfully tried in this domain. A true total effort would be at large integrated sites, it would identify potential routes to the goal and fully fund then all in parallel for redundancy. You would see rush built buildings and safety procedures and most federal laws would be waived.
As I understand it, NNI essentially gives separate university labs small grants to work on “nanotechnology” which includes a broad range of topics that are unrelated to the important one of a self replicating molecular assembler.
Presumably a reasonable outside view would be this effort will not develop such an assembler prior to 2100 or later.
If it became known that a rival government had nearly finished a working assembler and was busy developing “kill dust” that can make any human in earth drop dead on command, you would see such an effort.