[extropy-chat] Social Implications of Nanotech

[Robin Hanson]

In September 2000, the NSF held a Workshop on "Societal Implications of 
Nanoscience and Nanotechnology", and soon after issued a 
report:  http://wtec.org/loyola/nano/NSET.Societal.Implications/   I 
complained about that report, and so and have been invited to participant 
in the next version of the conference, being held December 3-5, 2003 (with 
abstracts due Nov. 17).

I haven't been thinking much about this topic for a while, and so I thought 
I'd strike up a conversation here to see what current thinking is and to 
refresh my mind.

An easy simple opinion to have is that nanotech won't have much in the way 
of specific social implications.  In this view, manufacturing will slowly 
become more precise and more automated, as it has for centuries, and so the 
social implications of nanotech are subsumed by the social implications of 
generally improving tech, and any specific products that enables.

Another opinion that I've heard has more distinct social implications, 
though I'm not sure how many people (still?) take it seriously.  It is 
described in the novel "Diamond Age" and in several books by Drexler and 
company.  In that vision, future manufacturing becomes much like how PCs 
are used today.  People have personal general manufacturing devices (PGMD, 
I'll call them) close to home, and most consumer goods are produced locally 
on PGMDs, via downloaded designs and a few general feedstocks.   A 
variation on this position posits that PGMDs can produce more PGMDs 
relatively quickly.  And a refinement of this position posits that such 
self-reproducing PGMDs dramatically lowers costs relative to technology 
available just prior to this point.

I'll focus my musings for now on this Drexlerian scenario, though I'm 
interested to hear if there are others that are taken seriously.  Here are 
some tentative observations, in no particular order:

1.  It is often assumed that a world of PGMDs is one of marginal costs near 
the cost of feedstocks, with the main fixed cost being the cost of 
design.  But this depends crucially on the PGMDs being typically used well 
below capacity, as most PCs are today.  Most manufacturing plants today 
have a pretty low marginal cost, in terms of how much you save if you 
operate them below capacity.  But since the plants are used near capacity, 
this makes them little like software or other goods that really do have a 
low marginal cost of production.

2.  A big question is by what factor general manufacturing devices are less 
efficient than specialized manufacturing devices, either in terms of 
production time, material waste, or final product quality.  The bigger this 
factor is, the larger need to be the scale economies in the production of 
PGMDs for them to dominate.  At the moment most manufacturing devices are 
really quite specialized.

3.  PGMDs embody almost *fully* automated manufacturing - if they need 
people to step in frequently to diagnose and fix assembly line problems, 
they become much less attractive.  While many manufacturing plants today 
are highly automated, it may cost quite a lot to produce designs for fully 
automated production processes.  So design costs may be a lot higher.

4.  The manufacturing fraction of the cost of most consumer goods today is 
rather small (15%), and only part (~1/3) of those manufacturing costs now 
are the physical capital, rather than labor and design.  So it is not clear 
how just lowering those manufacturing costs will have a huge effect on the 
economy.

5.  If the cost of designing and building an effective self-reproducing 
PGMD is much higher that of ordinary PGMDs, there might be plenty of 
ordinary ones around before any self-reproducing ones appear, minimizing 
the social impact of this transition.


Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323