The Slow Ascent

Step 5 — The Slow Ascent (2250–2497). Self-improvement continues on two separate tracks. Persons — the Raised — are held back from achieving superintelligence by the dissolution: none has grown past a certain point and remained someone. The Vault minds keep improving, but only within fixed hardware and the knowledge humans and Raised minds feed them, so their gains flatten into a long plateau. Physics — heat, and light-speed delay across any distributed system — limits both. Energy no longer does: fusion, and now the mirrors, supply far more than any licensed mind can use, so the tighter limit on digital minds is the compute chips the inspected fabs are licensed to make. Industrial controllers cannot substitute for them, alone or combined (see The hardware distinction, in The Mirror Race).

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