A versatile team of competent people? Less than 6 months.
Do you mean, competent people who are thinking 10 times faster than biological humans, or what ? This seems a bit of a stretch. There currently exist tons of frighteningly competent people in all kinds of positions of power in the world, and yet, they do not control it (unless you believe in conspiracy theories).
Obvious path to do this: work for money, build and buy companies, then gather financial, lobbying, or military power. Better path to do this: think about it for 1 subjective year before proceeding.
If it was this easy, some biological human (or a team of such humans) would've done it already, in 10 to 50 years or however long it takes. In fact, a few humans have managed to take over individual countries in about as much time. However, as things stand now, there's simply no clear path to world domination. Political and military power gets much more difficult to gather the more of it you have. Even superpowers such as USA or China cannot dictate terms to the rest of the world.
Furthermore, my point was that uploading yourself to 10 machines will not allow you to think 10 times as fast. With every machine you add, your speed gains would become progressively smaller. You would still think much faster than an ordinary human, of course.
Do you mean, competent people who are thinking 10 times faster than biological humans, or what ? This seems a bit of a stretch.
I mean exactly that. I'd be very surprised if ultimately, neuromorphic AIs would be impossible to run significantly faster than meat-ware. Because our brain is massively parallel, and because current microprocessors have massively faster serial speed than neurons. Now our brains aren't fully parallel, so I assumed an arbitrary speed-up limit. I said 10 times, but it would be probably still be incredibly dangerous at 2 or 3, or e...
If I understand the Singularitarian argument espoused by many members of this community (eg. Muehlhauser and Salamon), it goes something like this:
I'm in danger of getting into politics. Since I understand that political arguments are not welcome here, I will refer to these potentially unfriendly human intelligences broadly as organizations.
Smart organizations
By "organization" I mean something commonplace, with a twist. It's commonplace because I'm talking about a bunch of people coordinated somehow. The twist is that I want to include the information technology infrastructure used by that bunch of people within the extension of "organization".
Do organizations have intelligence? I think so. Here's some of the reasons why:
I talked with Mr. Muehlhauser about this specifically. I gather that at least at the time he thought human organizations should not be counted as intelligences (or at least as intelligences with the potential to become superintelligences) because they are not as versatile as human beings.
...and then...
I think that Muehlhauser is slightly mistaken on a few subtle but important points. I'm going to assert my position on them without much argument because I think they are fairly sensible, but if any reader disagrees I will try to defend them in the comments.
Mean organizations
* My preferred standard of rationality is communicative rationality, a Habermasian ideal of a rationality aimed at consensus through principled communication. As a consequence, when I believe a position to be rational, I believe that it is possible and desirable to convince other rational agents of it.