Yes, small isolated entities are getting more capable, but so are small non-isolated entities, and the later remain far more capable than the former.

I mentioned this recently on thhe thread two down from this one, but just in case it isn’t sinking in, the main issue in this area is not with isolated entities – rather it is with folks like Google – who take from the rest of the world, but don’t contribute everything they build back again – and so develop their own self-improving ecosystem that those outside the company have no access to. The only cost they pay involves not gaining in the short term by monetising their private tech (by sharing it) – and that cost can be swallowed gradually, a drop at a time.

This proves nothing, of course; but it is worth observing of the computational economy, in case you have some point that differentiates it from the nanotech economy. Are you sure you’re not being prejudiced by the sheer traditionalness of moving physical inputs around through specialized processors?

“Yes, small isolated entities are getting more capable, but so are small non-isolated entities, and the later remain far more capable than the former.”

The benefit from automation depends on the amount of human labor already in the process, a la the bee-sting principle of poverty. Automating one operation while many others are still human-controlled is a marginal improvement, because you can’t run at full speed or fire your human resources department until you’ve gotten rid of all the humans.

The incentive for automation depends on the number of operations being performed. If you’re doing something a trillion times over, it has to be automatic. We pay whatever energy cost is required to make transistor operations on chips fully reliable, because it would be impossible to have a chip if each transistor required human monitoring. DNA sequencing is increasingly automated as we try to do more and more of it.

With nanotechnology it is more possible to automate because you are designing all the machine elements of the system on a finer grain, closer to the level of physical law where interactions are perfectly regular; and more importantly, closing the system: no humans wandering around on your manufacturing floor.

And the incentive to automate is tremendous because of the gigantic number of operations you want to perform, and the higher levels of organization you want to build on top – it is akin to the incentive to automate the internal workings of a computer chip.

Now with all that said, I find it extremely plausible that, as with DNA sequencing, we will only see an increasing degree of automation over time, rather than a sudden fully automated system appearing ab initio. The operators will be there, but they’ll handle larger and larger systems, and finally, in at least some cases, they’ll disappear. Not assembly line workers, sysadmins. Bugs will continue to be found but their handling will be centralized and one-off rather than local and continuous. The system will behave more like the inside of a computer chip than the inside of a factory.

- such would be my guess, not to materialize instantly but as a trend over time.

It was a small part of total GDP, but a large portion of the world’s best scientists in relevant domains.

Carl, the Manhattan Project was probably the largest isolated research project in history, relative to world product at the time. And even it was a pretty small fraction.