| I think a lot of the confusion is coming from a conflation of two ideas that I've been guilty of here: design and fabrication. It will take a very long time for fabrication processes to catch up to current physical theory (unless we evolve those to...). Meanwhile, design can leapfrog far ahead of what we're capable of actually building, potentially into a realm where increases in processing power do not add any value.
What I'm saying is that your personal genie will not be using design principles, or have deep knowledge, that's very different from early-stage Edisonian AIs. In its design skills it'll be more advanced than early systems in the same way that modern internal-combustion engines are more advanced than a model-T's--however much its fabrication skills may have increased. Unless new physical principles are discovered, it's not unreasonable to imagine that an AI two hundred years from now might not be able to design a given device any better than an AI twenty years from now. At some point we reach a stage where the limitation is not in the intelligence of the AI but in the physical possibilities of what can be realized. I am suggesting that barring new science, this point can be nailed down fairly concretely.
What this whole discussion reveals is that there is a subtext to people's understanding of technology--i.e. a superstitious belief that it has no limitations. If it has no limitations then it is a supernatural power. If intelligence (design) has no limits then it too is a supernatural power. This strikes me as unlikely; and if there are limitations to what is technologically possible, what would such limits look like? It is not too early in history to ask this question.
A technological maximum doesn't preclude any of the products of technology that are so dear to SF writers and readers, or fans of the singularity and posthumanism--except for the sort of Matrioshka brain world where everything's made of smart matter that spends all its time thinking real hard about something or other.
And I disagree that the specifications for a personal genie will always increase. Specifications for required items may always change, but that's totally in line with what I've been saying. "Always increase" sounds suspiciously like another supernaturally limitless capability. I can imagine that someone in the future could want things that they can never have.
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