Dysoning the sun is just one way uploads could be completely transformative.
Is it really uploads that would make the difference between "really hard to construct a Dyson sphere" and "quite easy to construct a Dyson sphere"? It seems to me -- perhaps wrongly, so feel free to persuade me -- that most of the difficulties standing between our present situation and one where we've got a Dyson sphere around the sun would be left largely unaffected by easy uploads.
The linked post does not appear to contain any arguments or evidence for the proposition that uploads would make it easy to build a Dyson sphere around our sun. It just says: "About six hours of the sun's energy would be enough to launch self-replicating probes to every reachable galaxy in the entire universe. We could get this energy by constructing a Dyson swarm around the sun, by, for instance, disassembling Mercury. This is the kind of task that would be well within the capacities of an decently automated manufacturing process."
The paper costs £31.50 for access.
The second video has the more promising title of the two and has a substantial section about Dyson spheres/swarms. It also doesn't seem to me to say anything that indicates that, of the difficulties standing between us and a Dyson sphere, uploads would solve more than a small fraction.
The paper can be found here: http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Armstrong-Sandberg-Eternity-in-six-hours-intergalactic-spreading-of-intelligent-life-and-sharpening-the-Fermi-paradox.pdf
The main reason Dysonning the sun can be done at a fast pace is because of the exponential feedback loops. As long as we have some crude way of doing all the steps, then adding uploads allows us to automate the whole process, and get the exponential feedback.
If uploads can gather vast new resources by Dysoning the sun using current or near future technology, this calls into question Robin's model that standard current economic assumptions can be extended to an uploads world.
So far as I can see, you haven't demonstrated this or even made an argument to this end yet. It seems to me that basic economics still applies if there is a dyson sphere. There would still be scarce resources, the direction of the slope of the supply and demand curves wouldn't change, etc.
In a previous post (and the attendant paper and talks) I mentioned how easy it is to build a Dyson sphere around the sun (and start universal colonisation), given decent automation.
Why would a superintelligence build a Dyson sphere? Aren't there smarter ways of converting matter into entropy than letting it stew in its own juices at the bottom of a gravity well?
In a previous post (and the attendant paper and talks) I mentioned how easy it is to build a Dyson sphere around the sun (and start universal colonisation), given decent automation.
Decent automation includes, of course, the copyable uploads that form the basis of Robin Hanson's upload economics model. If uploads can gather vast new resources by Dysoning the sun using current or near future technology, this calls into question Robin's model that standard current economic assumptions can be extended to an uploads world.
And Dysoning the sun is just one way uploads could be completely transformative. There are certainly other ways, that we cannot yet begin to imagine, that uploads could radically transform human society in short order, making all our continuity assumptions and our current models moot. It would be worth investigating these ways, keeping in mind that we will likely miss some important ones.
Against this, though, is the general unforeseen friction argument. Uploads may be radically transformative, but probably on longer timescales than we'd expect.