Was this written before the existence of things like Amazon Cloud? It seems fairly obvious that EMs would be run in a way where what matters is not some slow to change piece of hardware you own, but fungible computing cycles you can buy however many you can afford at a fixed price at any given second.
Has there been some previous discussion of reliance on custom hardware? My cursory search didn't turn anything up.
Today's post, Brain Emulation and Hard Takeoff was originally published on November 22, 2008. A summary:
A project of bots could start an intelligence explosion once it got fast enough to start making bots of the engineers working on it, that would be able to operate at greater than human speed. Such a system could also devise a lot of innovative ways to acquire more resources or capital.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Emulations Go Foom, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.