[extropy-chat] Social Implications of Nanotech

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2003 at 01:12:36PM -0500, Robin Hanson wrote:

> 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.

I doubt things changed much while you weren't looking. It's a small, small
pool.
 
> 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 

Sure, Singularity won't have much in the way of specific social implications.
We'll get superhuman AI, it kills/transforms the entire local ecosystem by
side effect or malice aforethought, completely remodels the solar system and 
transforming the entire universe in its lightcone into something we currently 
can't imagine -- and that's assuming no major new physics. Business as usual, 
in other words.

> become more precise and more automated, as it has for centuries, and so the 

Sure, a couple of centuries worth of hitherto progress rolled into a month, or a 
couple of days. Accelerating up to a rate of 3 kYears of progress within 24 hours  --
that be 3 kYears of instant superculture progress, of course, not us-current.
<Yawn> Pass the butter. What else is new?

> 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 

The first time I read "Diamond Age" I laughed. Apart from broken physics in a
whole number of places, the future described was ludicrously incongrous. No
superhuman AI. Biology-based infoprocessing being competitive to dry nanoware. 
Containable gray goo. Ridiculous. Nice science fiction, though. Snow Crash
was considerably better, however. Lots more realistic.

> 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 

You'll notice Diamond Age doesn't allow end users to design. Even architects
are supervised closely (but easy enough to subvert). What do you think Eliezer's 
PGMD's first batch will be? Hmm, let me guess... No idea. *I* would be fabbing 
computronium by the metric truckload, though. Cubic meters, cubic miles, if I
can afford it.

> 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.

Molecular manufacturing that is useless for its own production doesn't
happen. It just gets eaten alive by the other kind. We already can manipulate 
single atoms and molecules just fine. With
processivity indistinguishable from zero, though, and that kills the golden
goose before it could even hatch. Things become far more interesting if we
can get fractional self-rep closure, and things just explode once closure is
over unity. Before, you're limited to nanogram output from very, very large
installations. On a budget very much like the Manhattan Project. 
 
> 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 

Evolution was a pretty good designer, last time I looked. Takes good care of
feedstock. Diversifies into places it wasn't originally destined to go.
Like: us. A pretty funky metamethod.

> 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.

If you don't have mints minting themselves, or at least going a good way
along the way there (looms to weave raw buckys from large-scale
thermosynthesis do qualify), you don't have molecular manufacturing.

Notice that you can get pretty good computronium by way of autoassembly, no
magic mints + Fairy Dust Forte(tm) required.
 
> 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.

How does current economy handle production of production means, including
persons? In an exponential rate? Superhuman persons? I'm not sure current
economic theory would be a good predictor here. 
 
> 3.  PGMDs embody almost *fully* automated manufacturing - if they need 
> people to step in frequently to diagnose and fix assembly line problems, 

People rarely step in to diagnose and fix the reproduction of locusts and
influenza. It's just a no-brainer self-runner. A mint is a lot less complex
than a locust.

> 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.

What does it take to produce a good meta-designer? A robust morphogenetic
code, an evolutionary system, a good nanoscale simulator, and lots of
computronium to run the above. As embarrassingly parallel as they come.
And that's about the only metainvention you need to make. 
 
> 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.

What would happen to the current economy if Alladin's lamps (with no
limitations on use, and no nasty Taliban types inside) could be had at WalMart?
 
> 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.

I think it's a highly laudable idea to figure out how to contain that
Pandora's box of tightly packed nonlinearities, but I just don't see it
happening. It will explode all over the place, and that's probably all for
the best.

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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