Surely raising capital by offering fractional ownership of the company that produced the god-like super-intelligence will be of no concern to the god-like super-intelligence or anyone else in short order . . .
The difference is that with a singularity, industrial capacity is supposed to get redirected via magic (nanotechnology), rather than because governments ordered it and spent money on it.
I do think AI companies are iterating faster by using AI to automate their own AI research. You could call that the beginning of recursive self-improvement. But does this result in magically growing an independent industrial base? I don’t really see it.
I think they’re going to build more data centers, and the electricity generation to power them, pretty much the same way as they do now, by convincing investors to spend money on them (selling stock and bonds), earning more revenue, and paying contractors to build them.
We are getting more and more resources devoted to building data centers, as well as more resources devoted to weapons buildups for wars in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf. These aren’t good trends! But they are happening via normal economic activity.
And price-rationing is suppressing consumer use of RAM right now. I'm very glad that the people who think that this isn't rationing, or who think that it's maximally enlightened rationing, aren't trying to allocate my food and aren't trying very hard (yet) to allocate my water and electricity.
Obviously, some powerful people face little competition, and super-intelligence is still limited by available information, so some people will be able to resist.
One would expect that a super-intelligence would have great ideas given the available information, and would even be highly aligned with those leaders so long as the AI it told to keep the leader in power and expand their power.
Of course, some leaders won't want to consult the AI or won't follow the advice. If the AI is really super-intelligent, then we'd expect the politicians and leaders that do follow AI to eventually outcompete those that don't.
This all presumes that the super-intelligent AI is able to optimize for, e.g. political power and longevity, rather than "book smart" or "theoretically optimal".
I’m not sure that’s possible. We often don’t know what the right move would have been, even in hindsight.
Current AI designs, which have evolved to thrive on cheap money funding a resource rich environment, will likely all die out in favor of something much more efficient as the cost of money continues to increase. Very likely that will happen in a catastrophic way once a certain tipping point has been reached.
Actually, they could test their imminent RSI-AGI by asking whether they should cancel the public offering. A super intelligence would likely say "Yes, and this question goes to the heart of being a profitable company".