I agree that bottlenecks like the ones you mention will slow things down. I think that’s compatible with this being a “jump in forward a century” thing though.
Let’s consider the case of a cure for cancer. First of all, even if it takes “years to get it out due to the need for human trials and to actually build and distribute the thing” AGI could still bring the cure forward from 2200 to 2040 (assuming we get AGI in 2035).
Second, the excess top-quality labour from AGI could help us route-around the bottlenecks you mentioned:
Human trials: AGI might develop ultra-high-reliability ways to verify that drugs work without human trials. That could either lead to a change in regulatory requirements or to people buying the AGI-designed drugs sooner in countries where that’s legal.
Manufacturing and distributing the drug: Imagine if we’d had 100 million of the most competent humans working (remotely) full time on optimising every step of the manufacturing+distribution process for COVID? They could have:
Planned out how to use all the US’ available manufacturing and transportation infrastructure maximally efficiently
Give real-time instructions to all the humans working in those industries so that they were more productive and better coordinated.
Recruit and train of new human workers (again instructing them in real-time) to increase the available labour.
More speculatively, it might not take long for AGI to design robots that could do the physical labour needed to manufacture and distribute the vaccines.
I agree that bottlenecks like the ones you mention will slow things down. I think that’s compatible with this being a “jump in forward a century” thing though.
Let’s consider the case of a cure for cancer. First of all, even if it takes “years to get it out due to the need for human trials and to actually build and distribute the thing” AGI could still bring the cure forward from 2200 to 2040 (assuming we get AGI in 2035).
Second, the excess top-quality labour from AGI could help us route-around the bottlenecks you mentioned:
Human trials: AGI might develop ultra-high-reliability ways to verify that drugs work without human trials. That could either lead to a change in regulatory requirements or to people buying the AGI-designed drugs sooner in countries where that’s legal.
Manufacturing and distributing the drug: Imagine if we’d had 100 million of the most competent humans working (remotely) full time on optimising every step of the manufacturing+distribution process for COVID? They could have:
Planned out how to use all the US’ available manufacturing and transportation infrastructure maximally efficiently
Give real-time instructions to all the humans working in those industries so that they were more productive and better coordinated.
Recruit and train of new human workers (again instructing them in real-time) to increase the available labour.
More speculatively, it might not take long for AGI to design robots that could do the physical labour needed to manufacture and distribute the vaccines.