Re: uncharitability: I think I was about as uncharitable as you were. That said, I do apologize—I should hold myself to a higher standard.
I agree they might be impossible. (If it only finds some niche application in medicine, that means it’s impossible, btw. Anything remotely similar to what Drexler described would be much more revolutionary than that.)
If they are possible though, and it takes (say) 50 years for ordinary human scientists to figure it out starting now… then it’s quite plausible to me that it could take 2 OOMs less time than that, or possibly even 4 OOMs, for superintelligent AI scientists to figure it out starting whenever superintelligent AI scientists appear (assuming they have access to proper experimental facilities. I am very uncertain about how large such facilities would need to be.) 2 OOMs less time would be 6 months; 4 OOMs would be Yudkowsky’s bathtub nanotech scenario (except not necessarily in a single bathtub, presumably it’s much more likely to be feasible if they have access to lots of laboratories). I also think it’s plausible that even for a superintelligence it would take at least 5 years (only 1 OOM speedup over humans). (again, conditional on it being possible at all + taking about 50 years for ordinary human scientists) A crux for me here would be if you could show that deciding what experiments to run and interpreting the results are both pretty easy for ordinary human scientists, and that the bottleneck is basically just getting the funding and time to run all the experiments.
To be clear I’m pretty uncertain about all this. I’m prompting you with stuff like this to try to elicit your expertise, and get you to give arguments or intuition pumps that might address my cruxes.
Re: uncharitability: I think I was about as uncharitable as you were. That said, I do apologize—I should hold myself to a higher standard.
I agree they might be impossible. (If it only finds some niche application in medicine, that means it’s impossible, btw. Anything remotely similar to what Drexler described would be much more revolutionary than that.)
If they are possible though, and it takes (say) 50 years for ordinary human scientists to figure it out starting now… then it’s quite plausible to me that it could take 2 OOMs less time than that, or possibly even 4 OOMs, for superintelligent AI scientists to figure it out starting whenever superintelligent AI scientists appear (assuming they have access to proper experimental facilities. I am very uncertain about how large such facilities would need to be.) 2 OOMs less time would be 6 months; 4 OOMs would be Yudkowsky’s bathtub nanotech scenario (except not necessarily in a single bathtub, presumably it’s much more likely to be feasible if they have access to lots of laboratories). I also think it’s plausible that even for a superintelligence it would take at least 5 years (only 1 OOM speedup over humans). (again, conditional on it being possible at all + taking about 50 years for ordinary human scientists) A crux for me here would be if you could show that deciding what experiments to run and interpreting the results are both pretty easy for ordinary human scientists, and that the bottleneck is basically just getting the funding and time to run all the experiments.
To be clear I’m pretty uncertain about all this. I’m prompting you with stuff like this to try to elicit your expertise, and get you to give arguments or intuition pumps that might address my cruxes.