It might be developed in a server cluster somewhere, but as soon as you plug a superhuman machine into the internet it will be everywhere moments later.
It's not like it's that hard to hack into servers and run your own computations on them through the internet. Assuming the superintelligence knows enough about the internet to design something like this beforehand (likely since it runs in a server cluster), it seems like the limiting factor here would be bandwidth.
I imagine a highly intelligent human trapped in this sort of situation, with similar prior knowledge and resource access, could build a botnet in a few months. Working on it at full-capacity, non-stop, could bring this down to a few weeks, and it seems plausible to me that with increased intelligence and processing speed, it could build one in a few moments. And of course with access to its own source code, it would be trivial to have it run more copies of itself on the botnet.
Even if you disagree with this line of reasoning, I don't think it's fair to paint it as "*very extreme".
It might be developed in a server cluster somewhere, but as soon as you plug a superhuman machine into the internet it will be everywhere moments later.
Even if you disagree with this line of reasoning, I don't think it's fair to paint it as "*very extreme".
With "very extreme" I was referring to the part where he claims that this will happen "moments later".
Vincent Müller and Nick Bostrom have just released a paper surveying the results of a poll of experts about future progress in artificial intelligence. The authors have also put up a companion site where visitors can take the poll and see the raw data. I just checked the site and so far only one individual has submitted a response. This provides an opportunity for testing the views of LW members against those of experts. So if you are willing to complete the questionnaire, please do so before reading the paper. (I have abstained from providing a link to the pdf to create a trivial inconvenience for those who cannot resist temptaion. Once you take the poll, you can easily find the paper by conducting a Google search with the keywords: bostrom muller future progress artificial intelligence.)