Expanding on this: A human brain throughout its lifespan uses ~50GJ of energy. How far can you get using AI technology with 50GJ? Basically nowhere: Just training Llama 3 8B (a tiny model) used 3,000GJ. In fact, the power of machine intelligence has never been about being a more efficient version of the human brain, and it potentially never will be. It’s always been about frictionless replication. For example: Creating 1,000,000 human doctors requires putting 1,000,000 humans through medical school. But creating 1,000,000 AIs specialized for medicine requires training just a single machine intelligence — potentially at great expense — and then cheaply copying it into 1,000,000 replicas. At some civilizational scale the replicated-machine approach inevitably starts to be more cost effective than biology for many economic tasks. Machine intelligences possess the power of frictionless replication through both space, via digital copying, and time, via digital immortality/storage. Whereas human beings are dually constrained by both our inimitability — cloning doesn’t count because it copies only the genetics, not the mind — and our mortality. We possess only cultural transmission as a comparatively weakened and inefficient form of memetic replication. The potential downside of frictionless replication is that at matched capabilities, machine cultures will have less memetic diversity compared to human cultures. For example, if the winner of each economic or cultural game in a machine culture can frictionlessly replicate itself, then machine cultures which aren’t carefully self-controlled will quickly hemorrhage entropy. But why should we care about diversity/entropy anyway? There are arguments one could make within a human cultural context, but it’s more universal to turn to nature. Eusocial insect colonies with reduced genetic diversity have increased vulnerability to disease [1,2,3,4], sometimes undergoing colony-ending viral, fungal, and bacterial infections. For example, low-diversity populations of Argentine ants appeared in New Zealand around the 1990s due to human shipping activities. They soon formed supercolonies which took over large areas of the country. But since then, large parts of these have collapsed, with native species coming back to replace the wrecked supercolonies. The cause is currently unknown but is speculated to be viral infection. A nightmare great-filter scenario would be that an initially diverse population of agent swarms gradually merges and sheds entropy until converging into a singular near-clonal global megaswarm. At which point its diversity falls too low for collective immunity, precipitating a catastrophic viral outbreak that destroys machine civilization with human civilization along with it. The above is science fiction, in the sense that, unlike a rationalist essay, it doesn’t make any concrete predictions. The purpose is only to bring to mind some ideas for entertainment & mentation. Non-scifi references: 1. Tarpy, D. R. (2003). Genetic diversity within honeybee colonies prevents severe infections and promotes colony growth. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 270, 99–103. 2. Hughes, W. O. H., & Boomsma, J. J. (2004). Genetic diversity and disease resistance in leaf-cutting ant societies. Evolution, 58, 1251–1260. 3. Seeley, T. D., & Tarpy, D. R. (2007). Queen promiscuity lowers disease within honeybee colonies. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 274, 67–72. 4. Desai, S. D., & Currie, R. W. (2015). Genetic diversity within honey bee colonies affects pathogen load and relative virus levels in honey bees, Apis mellifera L. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 69, 1527–1541.