[crotchfire]

Self-reproducing machines would be a breakthrough at least ten times as big as anything that's happened in machine learning lately.

People have been trying to make self-reproducing machines for decades. It's a way harder problem than language processing.

You might as well worry about what would happen if we suddently had antigravity laser-weapons. Mounted on sharks.

[krisoft]

Self-reproducing AI doesn't necessarily mean self-reproducing machines. AIs exist in computational substrate. We have a market to buy computational substrate. It is very efficient and automatic. The AWS/Azure/GCP API doesn't know if you are an AI nor does it care. As long as you have the money to pay for compute they will sell you compute.

I would say that an AI which can port its own code from one cloud to an other is self-reproducing.