The article irrationally assumes the best effort maximizer has no competition and long life, which we have not seen in endless lower powered implementations, an

The article irrationally assumes the best effort maximizer has no competition and long life, which we have not seen in endless lower powered implementations, and there seems to be no trend so unless it starts going exponential... There might be a barrier here, like speed of light or various mathematical limits that formalize the old saying of too many cooks spoil the broth. The required complexity of a uber-maximizer to handle the complex universe means its unprovably complicated and unreliable. Or you'd need a bigger computer than the universe to answer the halting question for a universe controlling control loop, or even something much smaller like a mere multinational corporation. Or another way to put it is a predatory competitor maximizer would inevitably be better at predation than its victim that focuses more on some arbitrary goal than on avoid becoming a meal, so in a hyper optimized playing field all you'd get is ever better predators eating each other and eating weaker non-predation focused orgs, or basically the modern business/finance system.