You have restored my faith in LessWrong! I was getting worried that despite 200+ karma and 20+ comments, no one had actually nitpicked the descriptions of what actually happens.

The zaps of light are diffraction limited.

In practice, if you want the atmospheric nanobots to zap stuff, you'll need to do some complicated mirroring because you need to divert sunlight. And it's not one contiguous mirror but lots of small ones. But I think we can still model this as basic diffraction with some circular mirror / lens.

Intensity $I=\frac{c_{e}E}{\pi r^2}$, where $E$ is the total power of sunlight falling on the mirror disk, $r$ is the radius of the Airy disk, and $c_e$ is an efficiency constant I've thrown in (because of things like atmospheric absorption (Claude says, somewhat surprisingly, this shouldn't be ridiculuously large), and not all the energy in the diffraction pattern being in the Airy disk (about 84% is, says Claude), etc.)

Now, $E=\pi {\left(\frac{D}{2}\right)}^{2}L$, where $D$ is the diameter of the mirror configuration, $L$ is the solar irradiance. And $r=\theta l$, where $l$ is the focal length (distance from mirror to target), and $\theta \approx 1.22\lambda /D$ the angular size of the central spot.

So we have $I\approx \frac{c_{e}L{D}^4}{{1.22}^2\times 4{\lambda }^2{l}^2}$, so the required mirror configuration radius $D=\sqrt[4]{4\frac{{1.22}^2\times 4I{\lambda }^2{l}^2}{c_{e}L}}$.

Plugging in some reasonable values like $\lambda \approx 5\times {10}^{-7}$ m (average incoming sunlight - yes the concentration suffers a bit because it's not all this wavelength), $I={10}^7$ W/m^2 (the level of an industrial laser that can cut metal), $l={10}^4$ m (lower stratosphere), $L=1361$ W/m^2 (solar irradiance), and a conservative guess that 99% of power is wasted so $c_e=0.01$, we get $D\approx 18$m (and the resulting beam is about 3mm wide).

So a few dozen metres of upper atmosphere nanobots should actually give you a pretty ridiculous concentration of power!

(I did not know this when I wrote the story; I am quite surprised the required radius is this ridiculously tiny. But I had heard of the concept of a "weather machine" like this from the book Where is my flying car?, which I've reviewed here, which suggests that this is possible.)

Partly because it's hard to tell between an actual animal and a bunch of nanobots pretending to be an animal. So you can't zap the nanobots on the ground without making the ground uninhabitable for humans. 

I don't really buy this, why is it obvious the nanobots could pretend to be an animal so well that it's indistinguishable? Or why would targeted zaps have bad side-effects?

The "California red tape" thing implies some alignment strategy that stuck the AI to obey the law, and didn't go too insanely wrong despite a superintelligence looking for loopholes

Yeah, successful alignment to legal compliance was established without any real justification halfway through. (How to do this is currently an open technical problem, which, alas, I did not manage to solve for my satirical short story.)

Convince humans that dyson sphere are pretty and don't block the view?

This is a good point, especially since high levels of emotional manipulation was an established in-universe AI capability. (The issue described with the Dyson sphere was less that it itself would block the view, and more that building it would require dismantling the planets in a way that ruins the view - though now I'm realising that "if the sun on Earth is blocked, all Earthly views are gone" is a simpler reason and removes the need for building anything on the other planets at all.)

There is also no clear explanation of why someone somewhere doesn't make a non-red-taped AI.

Yep, this is a plot hole.

Also this very recent one: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6h9p6NZ5RRFvAqWq5/the-summoned-heroine-s-prediction-markets-keep-providing

Do the stories get old? If it's trying to be about near-future AI, maybe the state-of-the-art will just obsolete it. But that won't make it bad necessarily, and there are many other settings than 2026. If it's about radical futures with Dyson spheres or whatever, that seems like at least a 2030s thing, and you can easily write a novel before then.

Also, I think it is actually possible to write pretty fast. 2k/day is doable, which gets you a good length novel in 50 days; even x3 for ideation beforehand and revising after the first draft only gets you to 150 days. You'd have to be good at fiction beforehand, and have existing concepts to draw on in your head though

Good list!

I personally really like Scott Alexander's Presidential Platform, it hits the hilarious-but-also-almost-works spot so perfectly. He also has many Bay Area house party stories in addition to the one you link (you can find a bunch (all?) linked at the top of this post). He also has this one from a long time ago, which has one of the best punchlines I've read.

Thanks for advertising my work, but alas, I think that's much more depressing than this one.

Could make for a good Barbie <> Oppenheimer combo though?

Agreed! Transformative AI is hard to visualise, and concrete stories / scenarios feel very lacking (in both disasters and positive visions, but especially in positive visions).

I like when people try to do this - for example, Richard Ngo has a bunch here, and Daniel Kokotajlo has his near-prophetic scenario here. I've previously tried to do it here (going out with a whimper leading to Bostrom's "disneyland without children" is one of the most poetic disasters imaginable - great setting for a story), and have a bunch more ideas I hope to get to.

But overall: the LessWrong bubble has a high emphasis on radical AI futures, and an enormous amount of fiction in its canon (HPMOR, Unsong, Planecrash). I keep being surprised that so few people combine those things.

I did not actually consider this, but that is a very reasonable interpretation!

(I vaguely remember reading some description of explicitly flat-out anthropic immortality saving the day, but I can't seem to find it again now)

I've now posted my entries on LessWrong:

• part 1: wisdom, amortised optimisation, and AI
• part 2: growth and amortised optimisation
• part 3: AI effects on amortised optimisation

I'd also like to really thank the judges for their feedback. It's a great luxury to be able to read many pages of thoughtful, probing questions about your work. I made several revisions & additions (and also split the entire thing into parts) in response to feedback, which I think improved the finished sequence a lot, and wish I had had the time to engage even more with the feedback.

Sorry about that, fixed now

[...] instead I started working to get evals built, especially for situational awareness

I'm curious what happened to the evals you mention here. Did any end up being built? Did they cover, or plan to cover, any ground that isn't covered by the SAD benchmark?