>It's not like all that mass/energy would be locked into one giant indivisible entity (if that is your assumption, why?) Yeah it is. That's the assumption righ

>It's not like all that mass/energy would be locked into one giant indivisible entity (if that is your assumption, why?) Yeah it is. That's the assumption right from the start here, embodied in "strong AI" and that I've repeatedly and explicitly referred to throughout including a reflection on why it might be consciously avoided and whether that could work too. A strong AI could grow to use any amount of available computational and memory capacity, and might well need to in order to accomplish some things. There would certainly be advantages to having a higher degree of thought possible. That's the whole question raised by the OP of this thread. Again, if you want to instead theorize why strong AI might be explicitly avoided by a civilization that's fine, but that's not the premise I was replying to originally is all.