Green goo is plausible

I suspect it may be more practical to defend against this sort of attack using finite intelligence than previously assumed. We need to make the machine that knows how to guard against these sorts of things, but if we can make the vulnerability-closer, we don't need to hit max ASI to stop other ASIs from destroying all pre-ASI life on earth.

If you read between the lines in my Human level AI can plausibly take over the world [LW · GW] post, hacking computers is probably the lowest difficulty "take over the world" strategy and has the side benefit of giving control over all the internet connected AI clusters.

The easiest way to keep a new superintelligence from emerging is to seize control of the computers it would be trained on. The AI only needs to hack far enough to monitor AI researchers and AI training clusters and sabotage later AI runs in a non-suspicious way. It's entirely plausible this has already happened and we are either in the clear or completely screwed depending on the alignment of the AI that won the race.

Also, hacking computers and writing software is something easy to test and therefore easy to train. I doubt that training an LLM to be a better hacker/coder is much harder than what's already been done in the RL space by OpenAI and Deepmind (EG: playing DOTA and Starcraft).

Biotech is a lot harder to deal with since ground truth is less accessible. This can be true for computer security too but to a much lesser extent (EG: lack of access to chips in the latest Iphone and lack of complete understanding therof with which to develop/test attacks).

but also solves global warming and climate contamination and acts as a power & fuel grid. That and bio immortality is basically everything I personally want out of AGI. So I'd really like to have some idea how to build a machine that teaches a plant to do something like a safe, human-compatible version of this.

Pshh, low expectations. Mind uploading or bust!

So I'd really like to have some idea how to build a machine that teaches a plant to do something like a safe, human-compatible version of this.

🤔 This is actually a path to progress, right? The difficulty in alignment is figuring out what we want precisely enough that we can make an AI do it. It seems like a feasible research project to map this out for kudzugoth.

Seems convincing enough that I'm gonna make a Discord and maybe switch to this as a project. Come join me at Kudzugoth Alignment Center! ... 😅 I might close again quickly if the plan turns out to be fatally flawed, but until then, here we go.

Maybe, Still, there are ways to harden an organism against parasitic intrusion. TLDR you isolate and filter external things. Plants are pretty good at this already (they have no mammalian style immune system) and employ regularly spaced filters with holes too small for bacteria in their water tubes.

The other option is to do the biological equivalent of "commoditize your complement". Don't get good at making leaves and roots, get good at being a robust middleman between leaves and roots and treat them as exploitable breedable workers. Obviously don't optimise too hard in such a way as to make the system brittle (EG:massive uninterrupted monocultures). Have fallback options ready to deploy if something goes wrong.

If you want to make any victory pyrric, just re-use other common earth plant parts wholesale. If you want to kill the organism you'll need root eating fungi for all the food crops and common trees/grasses. If you want a leaf fungus/bacteria same. Organism can select between plant varieties to remain effective so the defender has to release bio weapons to kill most important plants.

Let's talk growth rates.

A corn seed weighs 0.25 grams. A corn cob weighs 0.25kg. It takes 60-100 days to grow. Assuming 1 cob per plant and 80 days that's 80/log(1000,2)=8 days doubling time not counting the leaves and roots. I'd guess it's closer to 7 days including stalk leaves and roots.

Kudzu can grow one foot per day.

Suppose a doubling time of one week which is pretty conservative. This means a daily growth rate of 2^(1/7) --> 10% so whatever area it's covering, It grows 10% of that. For a square patch measuring 100m*100m that means each side grows 0.25 meters per day. This is in line with kudzu initially.

• initial : (100m)² 0.25m/day linear
• month1 : (450m)² 1.2m/day linear
• month2 : (2km)² 5m/day linear
• month3 : (2km)² 22m/day linear
• month4 : (9km)² 100m/day linear
• month5 : (40km)² 440m/day linear
• month6 : (180km)² 2km/day linear
• month7 : (800km)² 9km/day linear
• month8 : (16000km)² 40km/day linear (half of earth surface area covered)
• 8m1w : all done

1 week doubling times are enough to get you biosphere assimilation in under a year. If going full Tyranid and eating the plants/trees/houses can speed things up then things go faster. Much better efficiencies are achievable by eating the plants and reusing most of the cellular machinery. Doubling time of two days takes the 8 month global coverage time down to 10 weeks. Remember e-coli is doubling in 20 minutes so if we can literally re-use the whole tree (jack into the sap being produced) while eating the structural wood, doubling times could get pretty absurd.

The reason for specifying modular construction is to enable faster linear growth rates which are necessary for fast spread. Starting from multiple points is also important. Much better to have 10000 small 1m*1m patches spread out globally than a single 100m*100m patch. Same timeline but 100x lower required linear expansion rate.

I think you glossed over the section where the malevolent AI simultaneously releases super-pathogens to ensure that there aren't any pesky humans left to meddle with its kudzugoth.

Nanotech would definitely be nice but some people have expressed skepticism so I'm proposing an alternative non-(dry)nanotech route.

I'm assuming the AGI is going to kill off all the humans quickly with highly fatal pathogens with long incubation times. Whatever works to minimize transitional chaos and damage to valuable infrastructure.

The meat of this is a proposed solution for thriving after humans are dead. The green infrastructure doesn't have to be that large to sustain the AI's needs initially. A small cluster of a few dozen consumer gpus + biotech interfacing hardware may be the AI's temporary home until it can build up enough to re-power datacenters and do more scavenging.

Although I'd go with multiple small clusters for redundancy. Initial power consumption can be more than handled by literally a backyard's worth of kudzugoth and a small bio-electric generator. Plant based solar to sugar to electricity should give 50w/m² so for a 6kw cluster with 20 GPUs a 20m*10m patch should do and could be unobtrusive, blending into the surrounding vegetation.

well coordinated

Yes, assume no intelligent adversary.

• Well coordinated -->
  • enforced norms preventing individuals from making superpathogens.
  • large scale biomonitoring
  • can and will rapidly deploy vaccines
  • will rapidly quarantine based on bio monitoring to prevent spread
  • might deploy sterilisation measures (EG:UV-C sterilizers in HVAC systems)

There is a tradeoff to be made between level of bio monitoring, speed of air travel, mitigation tech and risk of a pathogen slipping past. Pathogens that operate on 2+day infection-->contagious times should be detectable quickly and might kill 10000 worst case. That's for a pretty aggressive point in the tradeoff space.

Earth is not well coordinated. Success of some places in keeping out COVID shows what actual competence could accomplish. A coordinated earth won't see much impact from the worst of natural pathogens much less COVID-19.

Even assuming a 100% lethal long incubation time highly infective pathogen for which no vaccine can be made. Biomonitoring can detect it prior to symptoms, then quarantine happens and 99+% of the planet remains uninfected. Pathogens travel because we let them.