Scott Alexander

So you're focusing on the nanobots.

I want to ask a couple questions.

One, what about just the regular robots?

And then two, what would your quantities be for all of these things?

So first, what about the regular robots?

Yeah, nanobots are presumably a lot harder to make than just regular robot factories.

And in our story, they happen later.

It sounds like right now you're saying even if we did get the whole robot factory thing going, it would still take a ton of additional full economy broad automation for a long time to get to something like nanobots.

That's totally plausible to me.

I could totally imagine that happening.

I don't feel like the scenario particularly depends on that final bit about getting the nanobots.

They don't actually really make any difference to the story.

The robot economy does sort of make a difference because there's two branches endings, as you know, and in one of the endings, the AIs end up misaligned and end up taking over.

And it's an important strategic change when the AIs are self-sufficient and just totally in charge of everything and they don't actually need the humans anymore.

And so what I'm interested in is when has the robot economy advanced to the point where they don't really depend on humans?

So quantitatively, what would your guess for that be?

If hypothetically we had the army of super intelligences in early 2028,

How many years would you guess until the, and hypothetically also assume that like the US president is like super bullish on like deploying this into the economy to beat China, et cetera.

So like the political stuff is all set up in the way that we have.

How many years do you think it would be until there are so many automated factories producing automated self-driving cars and robots that are themselves building more factories and so forth that like if all the humans drop dead, it would just keep chugging along and like maybe it would slow down a bit, but like it would still be fine.