= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
shminux comments on For FAI: Is "Molecular Nanotechnology" putting our best foot forward? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (117)
Drexler gets the physics right. It's harder to evaluate the engineering effort needed. Eliezer's claims about how easy it would be for an FAI to build MNT go well beyond what Drexler has claimed.
I'm fairly sure I know more about MNT than Eliezer (I tried to make a career of it around 1997-2003), and I'm convinced it would take an FAI longer than Eliezer expects unless the FAI has very powerful quantum computers.
Why do you expect this to help? What nanotech computations would a "very powerful quantum computer" accomplish so much faster than a classical computer? Or do you mean something like an "analog" quantum computer, also known as a "quantum simulator", which solves the Schrodinger equation by simulating the Hamiltonian and its evolution, rather than the "ordinary" digital quantum computer, which speeds up numerical algorithms?
Anything that makes the Schrodinger equation tractable would make me much less confident of my analysis.
How did natural selection solve this problem without quantum computers or even intelligence, and why can't an AI exploit the same regularity even faster?
Natural selection used trial and error. An AI would do that faster and with fewer errors.
Offhand, I would expect analog quantum simulators to come before digital quantum computers, given how they are already naturally everywhere, anyway, just not in a well-controlled way. Sort of like birds were a living proof that "heavier-than-air flying machines" are possible. This year-old Nature review seems to show a number of promising directions.