A 40-year-old replicator doomsday math, with 'AI' swapped in, mocks today's AI fears
connoraxiotes · x · 2026-10-01
Matt Ridley revives a passage from a 1986 book about nanotech replicators, swapping only the subject for "an artificial intelligence": one replicator copies itself every 1,000 seconds, yielding 68 billion copies in ten hours, a ton of mass in under a day, Earth's weight in under two days, and solar-system-topping mass four hours later.
His point: much of today's AI doomsday rhetoric is essentially this same exponential extrapolation, written four decades ago about chemistry, not AI. The post is a critique of exponential-growth panic arguments in AI discourse.
Related event: Matt Ridley: AI Doom Talk Echoes 40-Year-Old Grey Goo Panic(2 posts)→
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