The Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)
The paper 'On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines' argues that machines cannot exceed human size, despite speculation by some experts in computer science, philosophy, and physics. The authors present seven distinct arguments to demonstrate that such growth is not merely unlikely but fundamentally impossible. The work was published as a nine-page academic paper with two figures in the arXiv repository in March 2017.
- ▪The paper was authored by Ben Garfinkel, Miles Brundage, Daniel Filan, Carrick Flynn, Jelena Luketina, Michael Page, Anders Sandberg, Andrew Snyder-Beattie, and Max Tegmark.
- ▪It was submitted to arXiv on March 31, 2017, under the categories of Computers and Society and Popular Physics.
- ▪The authors argue that machines exceeding human size is not just implausible but impossible due to seven distinct theoretical constraints.
- ▪The paper is available as a PDF through the arXiv repository and has a DOI assigned via DataCite.
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | arXiv.org |
| Canonical URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.10987 |
| Publication time | Sat, 16 May 2026 20:28:56 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-16T20:40:19.047Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-16T20:40:19.047Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | V0prdshIzbSX |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Computer Science > Computers and Society arXiv:1703.10987 (cs) [Submitted on 31 Mar 2017] Title:On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines Authors:Ben Garfinkel, Miles Brundage, Daniel Filan, Carrick Flynn, Jelena Luketina, Michael Page, Anders Sandberg, Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Max Tegmark View a PDF of the paper titled On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines, by Ben Garfinkel and 8 other authors View PDF Abstract:In recent years, a number of prominent computer scientists, along with academics in fields such as philosophy and physics, have lent credence to the notion that machines may one day become as large as humans. Many have further argued that machines could even come to exceed human size by a significant margin.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at arXiv.org.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from arXiv.org
