What would a Sysop look like?
That is hard to say. It would depend on how a superintelligence designed it, if it decided to design a Sysop at all. It would probably not exist as a stand-alone computer humming away in a basement somewhere; it would need greater physical reach than that. Yudkowsky envisions it as a ubiquitously distributed underlying system it could be comprised of components so small that it would be effectively indistinguishable from the physical laws that it would supplement. You might only really be aware of a Sysop if you tried to do something that it had to prohibit. The ability to construct a Sysop consisting of such tiny and numerous elements is an expected consequence of nanotechnology, the nascent field of molecule-scale manufacturing. A superintelligence would likely be able to master molecular construction techniques faster and more thoroughly than the growing corps of human researchers ever could, which is an important consideration seeing as how we are probably farther away from develop
