Matt Ridley is a science writer and a former member of the House of Lords.
Imagine an artificial intelligence making copies of itself... the first replicator assembles a copy in one thousand seconds, the two replicators then build two more in the next thousand seconds, the four build another four, and the eight build another eight. At the end of ten hours, there are not thirty-six new replicators, but over 68 billion. In less than a day, they would weigh a ton; in less than two days, they would outweigh the Earth; in another four hours, they would exceed the mass of the Sun and all the planets combined.
This is the fate we face, according to many. Notice, though, that the paragraph above is in italics. That is because I did not write it. It was written 40 years ago in a book published in 1986, and I have changed just one phrase, substituting “an artificial intelligence” for “a replicator floating in a bottle of chemicals”. The book was not about AI at all – it was about nanotechnology.