Technology

With the caveat that I only read the transcripts, I don't find that compelling at all.

The initial sentiment is correct; folks like Sam Altman responding to existential problems like “oh we can just build a Dyson Sphere in 30 years” should be in freaking jail instead of power.

But the only other justification I see is “well, this is stupidly impractical in the context of current humans.” Things like:

• “What, we make all those nanobots and get all that energy with fusion and use it to disassemble Jupiter?”

• “Why don’t we just use that energy to leave the solar system?”

• “Say it’s a Dyson Swarm; what do we do living on all those solar satellites?”

She’s fallen into the same trap of “existing sci fi” she accuses other of falling into.

We’re not talking about a bunch of people in space looking to expand a habit. At this point, we’re talking about some AI that’s already converted an entire moons worth of mass into computronium, can upload folks to VR and simulate realities, that can reconfigure atomic nuclei into ultradense strings of matter or construct and control tiny black holes to generate energy and elements.

It’s left the solar system loooong ago.

Its capabilities, needs, and goals are completely umhuman, and at that point pondering how to efficiently capture the output of all this stellar mass sustainably is absolutely practical to plan. A Dyson Sphere (or more practically a swarm) isn’t the only way, but it’s not the worst idea for a “young” intelligence. And in OA, at a certain point, the Sephrotics seem to construct “sci fi” dyson spheres as habitats for aesthetic reasons, whereas their actual industrial/computational bases are more utilitarian arrangements of masses.