“fairly easy (e.g. a large but routine engineering project) with 10^22 FLOPS”

Just to ground this discussion a bit, I’m sure everyone knows that currently only IBM’s Roadrunner has been clocked for the full petaflop (10^15), altho’ its Blue Gene should “soon” be upgraded/upgradeable to run at 3 petaflops. (I might also watch Yoyotech, your friendly neighborhood supercomputer geeks, for this in the relatively near future, say less than 5 years.)

The full yottaflop (10^24) despite what seems like impossible situation – larger than an office building! would take more power than the entire NYC FiDi! or whatever – may however be practically conceivable, if those folks at Evolved Machines are really onto something.

Yes, we already distribute our manufacturing, parts are made in one location and shipped off to another for assembly, then drop shipped or warehoused then shipped off to local merchants. With nanotech capabilities and sufficient AI or even without it, we should be able to make this process even more distributed.

Rather than shipping parts to assembly houses we would be shipping raw nano-materials (the new ‘parts’) to local ‘distribution’ houses which would only need enough space for a few large production units. Due to the physical nature of their products these local distributors would still specialize in particular product lines – scaffolds for nano-materials still take up space. They may even do so because they are official distributors for a particular brand of products and would carry out the ‘manufacturing’, distribution and marketing of the products to the local populace – tailoring the specifications to that market as only a regional producer can.

I can see a future where intellectual property does play a large role in this… big brands create blueprints (patented/copyrighted of course) for various products and then license out the rights to modify/customize that blueprint for said regional markets. Big brands may even provide the startup capital for their franchises in the same way they do now for their storefronts.

A typical shopping experience would be like going to a high end furniture store or auto dealership. You shop the floor models and pick out your base model, then select features (color/texture/material, optional sizes, style, etc) and place your order. For a large item it would be delivered to your home.. smaller items would be made while you wait. Obviously there would still be pre-fab’d units available for those in a hurry or whom don’t care for customization – these would be cheaper and would be what the production units churn out when not producing a custom product. Overruns might go off to someplace like Costco where you can buy in bulk and where there is warehouse space available.

SO buying all kinds of products would be a much more personal experience and variations on products which currently can’t be made due to the need for consistent moulds and dies would be possible.

Viruses are proteins.

Non-full scale “nano” (which is not fully self-replicating) is not a new thing, see the big silicon fabs. (The self-replicating parts of today’s computers are called “software”.)

And I wouldn’t worry about watching over big fabs just in case a superhuman AI wants to do something nasty… I’m sure it would be more creative than that.

I think you might be right. Also, brains were not invented to think, in the first place.

To me, it all really seems to be the problem of software. We are seeking for “gods algorithm”. My guts feeling is that it will something relatively simple, I bet when somebody finaly finds it, we will all wonder why that have not happened much sooner..

Let’s say you need 1/3 of the industrial capacity to build a secret ship. If there are three big yards you will need just one of them, so you just have to get the top managers of this plant to keep the secret. But if there are 3,000 ship yards (of equal size) then you would need to have the managers of 1,000 ship yards keep the secret, something that will be very difficult.

Also, there will be some variance in the cultures of shipyards in terms of how good they are at keeping secrets. So the more shipyards that are in on the secret the more likely it is that you will have one that doesn’t succeed in keeping the secret.

Let’s say a government designed weapon could either be built by one company or 1,000 independent scientists who collaborate. Wouldn’t it be easier to keep the weapon a secret if it were built by just the one company?

If you just need one shipyard regardless of its size to build the ship then you would be right.

Moravec spent fewer pages than he did on Moore’s Law, justifying his calculation that the supercomputers we would have in 2008 would be “human-equivalent brainpower”.

Did Moravec nail that as well? Given the sad state of AI theory, we actually have no evidence against it. But personally, I suspect that he overshot; I suspect that one could build a mind of formidability roughly comparable to human on a modern-day desktop computer, or maybe even a desktop computer from 1996; because I now think that evolution wasn’t all that clever with our brain design, and that the 100Hz serial speed limit on our neurons has to be having all sorts of atrocious effects on algorithmic efficiency. If it was a superintelligence doing the design, you could probably have roughly-human-formidability on something substantially smaller.

Just a very rough eyeball estimate, no real numbers behind it.

Printers currently sit on our desks – but if we want a book or a magazine, we usually go to the shops.