(Keep in mind that biological machines, ie life, have managed to turn the surface of the planet into 'green goo'.)
None of em replace the entire planet though. That's a lot of rock to digest without any more energy to help you do it.
And a paperclip factory isn't self-reproducing (that would be a paperclip factory factory). It's just a regular machine that can break down. The people afraid of that one are imagining a perfect non-breaking-down non-energy-requiring machine because they've accidentally joined a religion.
All that oxygen comes from all the plants.
Yes, life has so far only covered the top of the planet. You are right that a paper clip maximizer would need quite a bit of time to go deeper than life has gone (if it would get there at all).
> And a paperclip factory isn't self-reproducing [...]
Why wouldn't it? If your hypothetical superhuman AGI determined that becoming self-reproducing would be the right thing to do, presumably it would do that.
No perfection required for that. Biological machines aren't perfect either. Just good enough.
You are right that thermodynamics puts a limit on how fast anything can transform the planet into paperclips or grey goo.
Though the limit is probably mostly about waste heat, not necessarily about available energy:
There's enough hydrogen around that an AGI that figured out nuclear fusion would have all the energy it needs. But on a planet wide basis, there's no way to dissipate waste heat faster than via radiation into space.
(Assuming currently known physics, but allowing for advances in technology and engineering.)
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Of course, when we worry about paperclip maximisers, it's bad enough when they turn the whole biosphere into paperclips. Noticing that they'll have a hard time turning the rest of the earth into paperclips would be scant consolation for humanity.
(But the thermodynamic limits on waste heat still apply even when just turning the biosphere into paperclips.)
This seems an odd refutation for several reasons.
First, the paperclip AI might determine that self-reproducing factories would be an optimisation, and aim to achieve that by any means necessary.
Second, a single paperclip factory that doesn't reproduce might still develop the means of bringing raw materials to it.
Either way, an all-consuming paperclip AI emerges.
In general, I find the equating of the paperclip problem with a religious cult to be naive.
This is quite possible. Indeed, I don't believe this is exclusive to superintelligence or requires it at all. Compare to the closest thing we have to "inventing AGI" - having babies. People do that all the time and there isn't a mathematical guarantee that baby won't end humanity, but we don't do much to stop it, and that's not considered a problem. Mainly, why would it want to?
https://twitter.com/thejadedguy/status/844352570470645760?la...
I don't think superintelligence even gives them much advantage if they wanted to. Being able to imagine a virus real good doesn't actually have much to do with the ability to create one, since plans tend to fail for surprising reasons in the real world once you start trying to follow them. Unless you define superintelligence as "it's right about everything all the time", but that seems like a magical power, not something we can invent.
> How exactly is "perpetual motion machines can't exist" related to this?
It wouldn't be able to do the particular kind of ending humanity where you turn them all into paperclips, though it could do other things. There's plenty of ways to do it that reduce entropy rather than increase it - nuclear winter is one.
The anthropomorphism is misleading. No one expects that an AGI would "want to" in the commonplace sense of being motivated by animosity, fear, or desire. The problem is that the best path to satisying its reward function could have adverse-to-extinction level consequences for humanity, because alignment is hard, or maybe impossible.
Your analogy is weak and also false: viruses can't self-reproduce, but need to bind to a host's protein synthesis pathways.
