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> robots seem mainly limited by software

First, I don't think so. Second, some resources would take even robots decades or centuries to collect. Even something as fundamental as energy production takes a lot of time and money to build. The question of where we'll get the energy to run the robots is not a simple one, and it's one of the simplest questions involved.

> I think that's what original comment was trying to argue, and I think it's possible within the limits you've laid out.

Possible isn't the same as likely, and the reason we don't extrapolate is that different extrapolations lead to very different results.

But regardless of what happens and when, I think that we, people educated in computer science, should remember that many questions are simply not answerable in a short amount of time, and we know with absolute certainty that answering them is not a question of intelligence but of computational power and time. We no that no human or machine, however intelligent, can predict or control the nonlinear systems that are all around us because they are computationally intractable.

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