the intuition that made it click for me was thinking of it less in terms of “intelligence” and more in terms of things like metr time horizons. a lot of work is intelligence x schlep gated and as you improve on those axes just about everything eventually falls. maybe you still miss some grand creative spark but nanotech doesn't require a creative spark from here it requires relentless grinding on miniaturization.

many things will still be bound on serial experimentation, but as the cost of any given level of intelligence goes to zero we'll end up running way more of the available experiments in parallel.