Re: The stagnation of Science and Technology. We've seen such stagnations before in history. Our culture has been losing the idea of science as a process of increasing understanding through inquiry. As expressed by the mass of people, the culture has been going towards a cargo cult worship of science. Western culture once enshrined the erroneous conclusions of Aristotle, instead of engaging in his act of inquiry. Re:…
This seems like a merely intelligent AI that can't do better than humans at producing the thing. For instance in the Universal Paperclips game (http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/), the AI starts by warping culture around the creation of paperclips.
That is (spoiler alert). . . ...
Until the AI learns to create hypnodrones to get the pesky humans out of the way. Then it uses their matter and the rest of the matter in the universe to create paperclips.