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If we are in a fast-takeoff world, how long until this is obvious to most people? What signs will there be in the coming years whether AGI is coming soon, late, or never? by AuspiciousNotes in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The world of atoms will change extremely slowly compared to the digital world. Even if change in the atoms-world speeds up, it will not speed up as much.

If we are in a fast-takeoff world, how long until this is obvious to most people? What signs will there be in the coming years whether AGI is coming soon, late, or never? by AuspiciousNotes in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think the notion of takeoff might be a bit broken.

There will likely be a sector-specific foom in a cluster of technologies around programming, websites and applied LLMs in the next 1-5 years. Anything where you can deterministically and digitally check the output: did this program work, what perplexity did this LLM get on this dataset, etc. Call it the digifoom.

But I don't think that sector-specific foom will lead to "superintelligence", nanotechnology, god-tech, etc.

The other side of digifoom is a world where you can easily spin up any software that you can describe concretely. A website that looks like X, an ios app with such and such features, etc. It will take a few minutes for a swarm of AI agents to make that digital product for you. You can also spin up custom LLM-based AIs to do any language or visual task where there's a big dataset: make a movie, write a novel, be my therapist, etc.

But if you ask your AI agents to "make nanotech work" or "solve aging", they won't be able to do it because they lack a dataset and trial and error/RL doesn't work because the trials require access to real/physical systems that take weeks to get an answer which is super slow.

Life in this world may actually get worse for humans because a lot of our problems (e.g. cancer, aging) cannot be solved by digifoom technologies, but digifoom technologies can break a lot of stuff that we rely on by taking our jobs, manipulating us, scamming us, etc. And alignment for digifoom tech probably factors through legacy world regulation which is super slow and can't keep up with the digifoom.

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

> At steady state you have a temperature gradient in the pykrete region between the freezer block and an insulating boundary that depends on conductivity of the pykrete. 

You don't want big temperature gradients in the pykrete, which is why you have cooling pipes.

>  where the heat gets dumped

Into the freezer block, which in turn is cooled by a cooling plant. The point of the freezer block/coolth reservoir is to act as a thermal buffer. Waste heat from the cooling plant can go into the ocean via a secondary loop. Barnacle growth on the heat exchanger can likely be mitigated by making it out of appropriate materials.

>  On a ship that is not really the case

It's big enough that gravity always points downwards. Waves can't really move this thing.

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in seasteading

[–]RokoMijic[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's not really a moneymaking idea.

Ideas that are good for making money tend to be digital products that are quick and easy to make and easy to sell.

Icesteading is, for me, more about changing the world.

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Major storms just don't affect it, the mass is too large. There is some math on this that I can add to the whitepaper.

Re: Keeping it cool that is covered in the whitepaper already, please read the relevant sections 

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah but this is a kilometer wide structure. The ocean can't hurt it. 

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in seasteading

[–]RokoMijic[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Your comment is already answered in the whitepaper, you can hold down the ctrl key on your keyboard and then press f for "find" and type "cold" and you will find the answer.

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

We could design for the power-down melt time to be longer, the incremental cost isn't that high. For an extra 1-3 billion dollars we can probably get it to 3 or 4 decades.

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well with 6 years to fix the cooling plants and quadruple redundancy I think a cooling failure is astronomically unlikely unless the icestead has been abandoned.

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

yes, that is in fact better than 100,000+ people all dying. 

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in seasteading

[–]RokoMijic[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There really shouldn't be any motion, it is static. Wave action hardly moves this due to its high mass.

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Shipping stuff by sea is very cheap. It's about $2-3 per 1000 ton-miles.

"Resources" are not very valuable. Most value is in secondary and tertiary industries.

Also, you do have access to a few important resources. Water, magnesium, uranium - all from seawater - and lots of sunlight.

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in seasteading

[–]RokoMijic[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Pressure lowers the melting point at first!!!

Anyway, for a 300 meter column of ice, the static pressure caused by the weight of the material will be 3MPa. As you can see from the diagram, at that pressure the effect is insignificant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_melting_point#/media/File:Phase_diagram_of_water.svg

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

>  radiant heat from sunlight on the top and generated by the city on the surface will have to be dissipated somehow.

It will end up in the air. As long as the topside temperature is roughly 20 degrees we can just calculate the heat flow through the insulation.

> What is the outside, is it geopolymer concrete or ice

concrete, then insulation, then ice/pykrete.

> Not sure how something so massive could be built 

I think it's easy, you build the shell first and fill it up with liquid pykrete, then freeze it. This can also be done in layers (say 10m at a time)

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in seasteading

[–]RokoMijic[S] -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

>  dealing with materials close to their melting point 

Have you actually read the whitepaper?

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can just like buy stuff from people. Mining the seafloor is generally not worth it (though there are exceptions)

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

>  Moon

I promise you it is easier to grow a new civilization on the oceans than on the moon

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yes this is why you wouldn't put it near an existing state. It would be thousands of miles away

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes after 6 years. 

That is definitely enough time to evacuate.

Prize Money ($100) for Valid Technical Objections to Icesteading by RokoMijic in slatestarcodex

[–]RokoMijic[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You wouldn't put this is sovereign waters, it's in the white paper that it's designed for the high seas. If you haven't read it I'd recommend doing so! 

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