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pcm comments on For FAI: Is "Molecular Nanotechnology" putting our best foot forward? - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
Estimating how long a strong AI takes to design molecular nanotechnology requires knowledge of molecular nanotechnology, knowledge of recursive artificial intelligence and knowledge of computation. This is particularly the case since most of the computation required to go from a recursively-self-improving-AI-seed to nanotech is going to be spent on the early levels of self improving, not the nanotech design itself.
The "unless the FAI has very powerful quantum computers" caveat gives a rather strong indication that your appeals to your own authority are less trustworthy with respect to AI and computation than they are about MNT (for reasons alluded to by shminux).
There are some problems for which knowledge of the problem plus knowledge of computation is sufficient to estimate a minimum amount of computation needed. Are you claiming to know that MNT isn't like that? Or that an AI can create powerful enough computers that that's irrelevant?
Appeals to authority about AI seem unimpressive, since nobody has demonstrated expertise at creating superhuman AI.
Perhaps my token effort at politeness made me less than completely clear. That wasn't an appeal to AI authority. That was a rejection of your appeal to your own personal authority based on the degree to which you undermined your credibility on the subject by expressing magical thinking about quantum computation.
You just appealed to your own authority about molecular nano-technology. When can I expect you to announce your product release? (Be consistent!)
Magical thinking? I intended to mainly express uncertainty about it.
I don't expect appeals to authority to accomplish much here. Maybe it was a mistake for me to mention it at all, but I'm concerned that people here might treat Eliezer as more of an authority on MNT than he deserves. I only claimed to have more authority about MNT than Eliezer. That doesn't imply much - I'm trying to encourage more doubt about how an AI could take over the world.
Can you provide more detail and maybe give some examples?
From this paper, page 26:
Has Drexler said anything which implies that step 4 would succeed without lots of trial and error?
I'd like to address just the claim here that you could provide instructions to a nanosystem with a speaker. If we assume that the frequency range of the speaker lines up with human hearing, and that our nanosystem is in water, then the smallest possible wavelength we can get from our speaker is on the order of 7cm.
lamda=v / f= 1500 m/s / 20 kHz
How can you provide instructions to a nanosystem with a signal whose linear dimension is on the order of cm? How can you precisely control something when your manipulator is orders or magnitude larger than the thing you're manipulating?
You can get microphones much smaller than 7 cm, and they can detect frequencies way lower than 20 kHz. There's no rule saying you need a large detector to pick up a signal with a large wavelength.
I believe the original comment isn't about the receiver, but about the emitter -- that if you use audible-range sound or even ultrasound, the spatial resolution of the signal will be impossibly large compared to a nanobot. Each nanobot will be able to get the signal, but you won't be able to only communicate with nanobots in a specific part of the body.
This might not be a fatal objection, since you could imagine some sort of protocol with unique addresses or whatnot, but it's an objection.
This isn't about bots, it's about a little tiny factory building your second-stage materials.
You can get the effect of a huge telescope lens with an array of smaller telescopes. Could you get the same effect for sound?
Sure, if you can have all your pieces coordinate and stay coordinated with other. If you do that, you still have a communication problem, just a different one.