I disagree that nanotech has to predate taking over the world; that wasn’t an assumption I was making or a conclusion I was arguing for at any rate. I agree it is less likely that ASIs will make nanotech before takeover than that they will make nanotech while still on earth.
Sorry, to be clear, I wasn’t actually making a prediction as to whether nanotech predates AI takeover. My point is that that these discussions are in the context of the question “can nanotech be used to defeat humanity”. If AI can only invent nanotech after defeating humanity, that’s interesting but has no bearing on the question.
I also lack the energy or interest to do the modelling, so we’ll have to leave it there.
My closing statement is that I think your kind of reasoning would have been consistently wrong had it been used in the past—e.g. in 1600 you would have declared so many things to be impossible on the grounds that you didn’t see a way for the natural philosophers and engineers of your time to build them. Things like automobiles, flying machines, moving pictures, thinking machines, etc. It was indeed super difficult to build those things, it turns out—‘impossible’ relative to the R&D capabilities of 1600 -- but R&D capabilities improved by many OOMs, and the impossible became possible.
My closing rebuttal: I have never stated that I am certain that nanotech is impossible. I have only stated that it could be impossible, impractical, or disappointing, and that the timelines for development are large, and would remain so even with the advent of AGI.
If I had stated in 1600 that flying machines, moving pictures, thinking machines, etc were at least 100 years off, I would have been entirely correct and accurate. And for every great technological change that turned out to be true and transformative, there are a hundred great ideas that turned out to be prohibitively expensive, or impractical, or just plain not workable. And as for the ones that did work out, and did transform the world: it almost always took a long time to build them, once we had the ability to. And even then they started out shitty as hell, and took a long, long time to become as flawless as they are today.
I’m not saying new tech can’t change the world, I’m just saying it can’t do it instantly.
(I forgot to mention an important part of my argument, oops—You wouldn’t have said “at least 100 years off” you would have said “at least 5000 years off.” Because you are anchoring to recent-past rates of progress rather than looking at how rates of progress increase over time and extrapolating. (This is just an analogy / data point, not the key part of my argument, but look at GWP growth rates as a proxy for tech progress rates: According to this GWP doubling time was something like 600 years back then, whereas it’s more like 20 years now. So 1.5 OOMs faster.) Saying “at least a hundred years off” in 1600 would be like saying “at least 3 years off” today. Which I think is quite reasonable.)
That argument does make more sense, although it still doesn’t apply to me, as I would never confidently state a 5000 year forecast due to the inherent uncertainty of long term predictions. (My estimates for nanotech are also high uncertainty, for the record).
Sorry, to be clear, I wasn’t actually making a prediction as to whether nanotech predates AI takeover. My point is that that these discussions are in the context of the question “can nanotech be used to defeat humanity”. If AI can only invent nanotech after defeating humanity, that’s interesting but has no bearing on the question.
I also lack the energy or interest to do the modelling, so we’ll have to leave it there.
My closing rebuttal: I have never stated that I am certain that nanotech is impossible. I have only stated that it could be impossible, impractical, or disappointing, and that the timelines for development are large, and would remain so even with the advent of AGI.
If I had stated in 1600 that flying machines, moving pictures, thinking machines, etc were at least 100 years off, I would have been entirely correct and accurate. And for every great technological change that turned out to be true and transformative, there are a hundred great ideas that turned out to be prohibitively expensive, or impractical, or just plain not workable. And as for the ones that did work out, and did transform the world: it almost always took a long time to build them, once we had the ability to. And even then they started out shitty as hell, and took a long, long time to become as flawless as they are today.
I’m not saying new tech can’t change the world, I’m just saying it can’t do it instantly.
Thanks for discussing with me!
(I forgot to mention an important part of my argument, oops—You wouldn’t have said “at least 100 years off” you would have said “at least 5000 years off.” Because you are anchoring to recent-past rates of progress rather than looking at how rates of progress increase over time and extrapolating. (This is just an analogy / data point, not the key part of my argument, but look at GWP growth rates as a proxy for tech progress rates: According to this GWP doubling time was something like 600 years back then, whereas it’s more like 20 years now. So 1.5 OOMs faster.) Saying “at least a hundred years off” in 1600 would be like saying “at least 3 years off” today. Which I think is quite reasonable.)
That argument does make more sense, although it still doesn’t apply to me, as I would never confidently state a 5000 year forecast due to the inherent uncertainty of long term predictions. (My estimates for nanotech are also high uncertainty, for the record).
no worries, I enjoyed the debate!