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Comment by janalsncm

5 hours ago

I don’t need to know the value of their limit, I just need to know their bounds. Just like a prison doesn’t need to know the strength of each inmate, just that they can’t bend or bite through steel bars.

Cryptography is real, physics is real, networking requires a substrate, CPU clock cycles are real, magic is not real. I think those are pretty reasonable premises.

Imagine 200 years ago saying the same thing. As if you have any idea the limits/bounds of anything. Especially in the face of a super intelligence, it’s absurd.

  • It doesn’t matter how smart it is. 200 years of technology were not accomplished by thinking harder. It required empirical observation, new materials and tools, and supply chains.

    We could send a cracked team of scientists and engineers that knew everything there is to know about how to make a CPU. But you can’t build a photolithography machine when you barely have electricity or any way to sufficiently purify silicon.

    Magic can just wish things into existence. Technology requires a supply chain. When it works, the latter looks like the former but they are not the same.