Earlier quoted context omitted.
I totally agree with you that intelligence is not really omnipotence on its own, but what I find concerning is that there is no hard ceiling on this with electronic systems. It seems plausible to me that a single datacenter could host the intellectual equivalent of ALL human university researchers. Our brains can not really scale in size nor power input, and the total number of human brains seems unlikely to signific…
>I totally agree with you that intelligence is not really omnipotence on its own, but what I find concerning is that there is no hard ceiling on this with electronic systems. It seems plausible to me that a single datacenter could host the intellectual equivalent of ALL human university researchers. Last time I checked, datacenter still needed significant power to fuel it, and the world where robots are autonomously…
Likewise, one can imagine the evolution of AI's being bootstrapped, not by self-multiplying, but by humans multiplying them. The smartest ones will get copied by people. At some point, someone will be the first person to create an AI that picks the best of other AIs and uses them. Someone will be the first person to create an AI that can engineer and train other AIs. Someone will create the first robot body to be controlled by a very intelligent AI. People will want them as servants, and we will multiply them. We will give more money to companies that provide cheaper products, and such companies will have a strong incentive to replace human labor with AI-controlled robots. There will be a first datacenter, and a first power plant, that is entirely "manned" by AI-controlled robots.
Natural selection is not so different from the selection provided by economic forces, and it's way, way slower. This train may be hard to stop. Unless we collectively push back with a lot of force, the world will tend toward more automation, and that means more ways for digital intelligences to act on the world.