Well, I cannot help your inclination to take Eliezer's side, but I would like to point out all the anti-physics stuff in the original article: 1) Eliezer makes

Well, I cannot help your inclination to take Eliezer's side, but I would like to point out all the anti-physics stuff in the original article: 1) Eliezer makes up a term ("diamondoid bacteria"), and the current scientific understanding is that we have no methods to perform nanoscale manipulations of any material that would be understood as being "diamondoid". Someone else already went through the pains of comparing the fiction to current understanding of science here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g72tGduJMDhqR86Ns/diamondoid-bacteria-nanobots-deadly-threat-or-dead-end-a https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g72tGduJMDhqR86Ns/... The TL;DR is: There won't be anything like a Drexler nanobot thing on any realistic time horizon, if ever. 2) The described scenario involves an AI - reasoning purely from human input, without access to any empirical experiments - succeeding at building a "nanofactory" which then builds the bacteria. The author of the above article phrases it very well: "First, forget the dream of advances in theory rendering experiment unnecessary. As I explained in a previous post, the quantum equations are just way too hard to solve with 100% accuracy, so approximations are necessary, which themselves do not scale particularly well." All our theoretical understanding of everything is often a poor abstraction of reality, and it is common for even our highest-quality models for computational fluid dynamics to diverge drastically from real-world experiments. There's simply no way an AI will "reason/simulate itself through a bunch of experiments". That's not how our world and our physics work, and largely what I mean when I accuse the x-Risk crowd of being "anti-physics". The theory of building a ballpoint pen tip is very simple. The actual execution is fiendishly hard, and only a few industrialized nations have mastered it. My experience with Eliezer's writings, and a large number of x-risk adjacent people, is that they have no experience with real-world engineering or any experimental science. They simply haven't internalized that the map isn't the territory, that the real world is messy and fundamentally unpredictable. The intellectual feats they ascribe to an AI aren't far off from the AI simply finding a shortcut to calculating the trajectory of all atoms in the atmosphere and then convincing a butterfly to flap his wing at the precisely right time that in an enormous game of billards is unleashed to build a global Maxwell's demon which incinerates one half of the world. Conceivable, if you neglect that (a) you can't gather the required information and (b) you can't perform the compute required. Anyhow, my suspicion is that if the original nanobot madness didn't convince you, nothing I can write will either :-) so I think I'll excuse myself from this discussion.