The seminal Engines of Creation by K. Eric Drexler is finally available online! I can still remember the exhilarating feeling I had when I read the chapter about Thinking Machines.

In a sense, artificial intelligence will be the ultimate tool because it will help us build all possible tools. Advanced AI systems could maneuver people out of existence, or they could help us build a new and better world. Aggressors could use them for conquest, or foresighted defenders could use them to stabilize peace. They could even help us control AI itself. The hand that rocks the AI cradle may well rule the world.

Only cooling problems might limit such machines to slower average speeds. Imagine a conservative design, a millionfold faster than a brain and dissipating a millionfold more heat. The system consists of an assembler-built block of sapphire the size of a coffee mug, honeycombed with circuit-lined cooling channels. A high-pressure water pipe of equal diameter is bolted to its top, forcing cooling water through the channels to a similar drainpipe leaving the bottom. Hefty power cables and bundles of optical-fiber data channels trail from its sides. 

The cables supply fifteen megawatts of electric power. The drainpipe carries the resulting heat away in a three-ton-per-minute flow of boiling-hot water. The optical fiber bundles carry as much data as a million television channels. They bear communications with other AI systems, with engineering simulators, and with assembler systems that build designs for final testing. Every ten seconds, the system gobbles almost two kilowatt-days of electric energy (now worth about a dollar). Every ten seconds, the system completes as much design work as a human engineer working eight hours a day for a year (now worth tens of thousands of dollars). In an hour, it completes the work of centuries. For all its activity, the system works in a silence broken only by the rush of cooling water. 



This addresses the question of the sheer speed of thought, but what of its complexity? AI development seems unlikely to pause at the complexity of a single human mind. As John McCarthy of Stanford's AI lab points out, if we can place the equivalent of one human mind in a metal skull, we can place the equivalent of ten thousand cooperating minds in a building. (And a large modern power plant could supply power enough for each to think at least ten thousand times as fast as a person.) To the idea of fast engineering intelligences, add the idea of fast engineering teams.