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gjm comments on Cosmic expansion vs uploads economics? - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
But why would you need an exponential number of human-equivalent intelligences for this? Why not much stupider robots?
Robots capable of doing that task would be enough, but running and building factories and dealing with problems could be tricky with current AI. Humans can do this, so uploads could as well.
If a process involves uploads, which are people, then it isn't "automated."
This seems to be a comment more that is disputing definitions than actually making a statement about what we actually expect to observe.
If he's going to use a word in a way that is so different from it's normal denotations and connotations, he needs to explain why he's using that word, and what it means to him.
I don't think many people have a strong intuition either way about whether the word "automated" should include uploads or not. At least for me, I don't feel strongly about it either way, and I suspect that many feel similarly.