EA - "Diamondoid bacteria" nanobots: deadly threat or dead-end? A nanotech investigation by titotal

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: "Diamondoid bacteria" nanobots: deadly threat or dead-end? A nanotech investigation, published by titotal on September 29, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Confidence level: I'm a computational physicist working on nanoscale simulations, so I have some understanding of most of the things discussed here, but I am not specifically an expert on the topics covered, so I can't promise perfect accuracy.I want to give a huge thanks to Professor Phillip Moriarty of the university of Nottingham for answering my questions about the experimental side of mechanosynthesis research.Introduction:A lot of people are highly concerned that a malevolent AI or insane human will, in the near future, set out to destroy humanity. If such an entity wanted to be absolutely sure they would succeed, what method would they use? Nuclear war? Pandemics?According to some in the x-risk community, the answer is this: The AI will invent molecular nanotechnology, and then kill us all with diamondoid bacteria nanobots.This is the "lower bound" scenario posited by Yudkowsky in his post AGI ruin:The nanomachinery builds diamondoid bacteria, that replicate with solar power and atmospheric CHON, maybe aggregate into some miniature rockets or jets so they can ride the jetstream to spread across the Earth's atmosphere, get into human bloodstreams and hide, strike on a timer.The phrase "diamondoid bacteria" really struck out at me, and I'm not the only one. In this post by Carlsmith (which I found very interesting), Carlsmith refers to diamondoid bacteria as an example of future tech that feels unreal, but may still happen:Whirling knives? Diamondoid bacteria? Relentless references to paper-clips, or "tiny molecular squiggles"? I've written, elsewhere, about the "unreality" of futurism. AI risk had a lot of that for me.Meanwhile, the controversial anti-EA crusader Emille Torres cites the term "diamondoid bacteria" as a reason to dismiss AI risk, calling it "patently ridiculous".I was interested to know more. What is diamondoid bacteria? How far along is molecular nanotech research? What are the challenges that we (or an AI) will need to overcome to create this technology?If you want, you can stop here and try and guess the answers to these questions.It is my hope that by trying to answer these questions, I can give you a taste of what nanoscale research actually looks like. It ended up being the tale of a group of scientists who had a dream of revolutionary nanotechnology, and tried to answer the difficult question: How do I actually build that?What is "diamondoid bacteria"?The literal phrase "diamondoid bacteria" appears to have been invented by Eliezer Yudkowsky about two years ago. If you search the exact phrase in google scholar there are no matches:If you search the phrase in regular google, you will get a very small number of matches, all of which are from Yudkowsky or directly/indirectly quoting Yudkowsky. The very first use of the phrase on the internet appears to be this twitter post from September 15 2021. (I suppose there's a chance someone else used the phrase in person).I speculate here that Eliezer invented the term as a poetic licence way of making nanobots seem more viscerally real. It does not seem likely that the hypothetical nanobots would fit the scientific definition of bacteria, unless you really stretched the definition of terms like "single-celled" and "binary fission". Although bacteria are very impressive micro-machines, so I wouldn't be surprised if future nanotech bore at least some resemblance.Frankly, I think inventing new terms is an extremely unwise move (I think that Eliezer has stopped using the term since I started writing this, but others still are). "diamondoid bacteria" sounds science-ey enough that a lot of people would assume it was already a scien...