But wanting not to talk to us might be a reason to make themselves hard to detect. Kind of moving to the quieter place when you can’t find anyone interesting at a party.

At some point they’ll hit the speed of light as a limit to how quickly it can propagate its internal state to itself - as the brain grows larger, the mind slows down or breaks apart into smaller units that can work faster before rejoining the bigger entity and propagating its new state.

Must feel really strange.

True, but they have abandoned the subtlety of the factbook.

Until you change the dominant technology. At some point we ditched germanium transistors for silicon ones because the latter switched faster.

The natural ceiling is the amount of compute per unit of energy. At the point you can no longer improve energy efficiency, you can still add more energy to operate more compute capacity.

> and many of them have no particular reason to be visible at astronomical distances.

Or to want to talk to meat.

https://youtu.be/T6JFTmQCFHg

He might not escape, but my grandson stands a reasonably good chance at this time.

> I, for one, look forward to writing out a complete essay in cursive with a pencil

My tendinitis complained as I read this. It told me not to dare trying that.

> A true singularity/infinity

It can’t be infinitely fast, but after the point where we all collectively cease to be able to comprehend the rate of change, it’s effectively a discontinuity from our point of view.

I think we can stop building new streetlights at the moment we have full daylight illumination on the visible spectrum 24x7 in urban areas. We’ll probably settle for much less and be happy with that.

If we need more light, we can deploy more power generators.

> As one technology S-curves, another technology replaces it

Even if for no other reason than us abandoning a diminishing returns approach looking for other alternatives.

We have been kind of at the end of the rope for silicon for quite some time now and we found increasingly heroic ways to protect our investment in silicon based semiconductors, but silicon is not the only option - it’s just the one we have a lot of supply chains already set up.

We can always build a sunshade in the Earth-Sun L1. Make it a Sun facing PV panel pointing radiators away from us and we can power a lot of compute there (useful life might be limited, but compute modules can be recycled and replaced, and nothing needs to be launched from Earth in this case).

There are hard limits for how much energy we can provide to computation, but we are not even close to what we can do in a non-suicidal way. In addition to expanding renewables, we could also expand nuclear and start building Thorium reactors - this alone ensures at least an extra order of magnitude in capacity compared to Uranium.

As for the compute side, we are running inference on GPUs which are designed for training. There are enormous inefficiencies in data movement in these platforms.

If we play our cards right we might have autonomous robots mining lunar resources and building more autonomous robots so they can mine even more. If we manage to bootstrap a space industry on the Moon with primarily autonomous operations and full ISRU, we are on our way to build space datacenters that might actually be economically viable.

There is a lot of stuff that needs to happen before we have a Dyson ring or a Matrioska brain around the Sun, but we don’t need to break any laws of physics for that.

> Maybe we need a FOIA request to get the entire contents released to the public.

That’s a sound idea.

Nor is soft power.

The factbook was much more a tool for propaganda than anything else. While you could trust most of the numbers, you shouldn’t expect it to be fair about any socialist or communist countries, usually classified as brutal dictatorships, while it would always be exceedingly kind to countries with US sponsored dictators.