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Be careful with large numbers: 10^23 shoes would be roughly 854B shoes for every (~117B) human that have ever lived, that is about 14 million pairs of shoes per individual and per day. I am pretty sure there has never been a market for that many shoes.

Truly the shoe event horizon. Next step: become birds.

IEEE

https://spectrum.ieee.org/transistor-density

Interpolate out and we're close to 10^23

Letters?

Paperclips?

An average paper clip is 204.8mm^3. 10^23 of those would be 2.048x10^19 L in volume[1]. That would be only two orders of magnitude less than total volume of oceans 1.33x10^21 L [2]. So I think not.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=volume+of+a+paperclip+t...

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=total+volume+of+oceans

10^23? Maybe if we push all the way to AGI.

Is that a reference to the "Universal Paperclips" game?

Basically, yes. Or at least it's related. The game is based on (arguably, a misinterpretation of) the writings of Elizer Yudkowski.