There’s a fun version of this in futurist space travel speculation.

Let’s say you have the a fusion rocket and can hit 5% the speed of light. You want to migrate to the stars for some reason.

So do you build a generational ship now, which is possible, or… do you wait?

Because if you build it now someone with a much better drive may just fly right past you at 20% the speed of light.

In this one the answer is to plot it out under the assumption there is no totally undiscovered major physics that would allow, say, FTL, and plot the curves for advancement against that.

So can we do this with software? We have the progress of hardware, which is somewhat deterministic, and we know something about the progress of software from stats we can make via GitHub.

The software equivalent of someone discovering some “fantasy” physics and building a warp drive would be runaway self-improving AGI/ASI. I’d argue this is impossible for information theoretical reasons, but what if I’m wrong?