I’m not a biologist, but the point is that you can start with a tiny amount of material and still scale up to large quantities extremely quickly with short doubling times. As for competition, there are many ways in which human design technology can exceed (and has exceeded) natural biological organisms’ capabilities. These include better materials, not being constrained by evolution, not being constrained by having the organism function as it is built, etc. As for the large end, good point about availability of uranium. But the super intelligence could design many highly transmissible and lethal viruses and hold the world hostage that way. Or think of much more effective ways than we can think of. The point is that we cannot dismiss that the super intelligence could take over the world very quickly.
I’m not a biologist, but the point is that you can start with a tiny amount of material and still scale up to large quantities extremely quickly with short doubling times. As for competition, there are many ways in which human design technology can exceed (and has exceeded) natural biological organisms’ capabilities. These include better materials, not being constrained by evolution, not being constrained by having the organism function as it is built, etc. As for the large end, good point about availability of uranium. But the super intelligence could design many highly transmissible and lethal viruses and hold the world hostage that way. Or think of much more effective ways than we can think of. The point is that we cannot dismiss that the super intelligence could take over the world very quickly.