[extropy-chat] Social Implications of Nanotech

[Robin Hanson]

On 11/10/2003, Hal Finney wrote:
>I have a lot of trouble considering these future scenarios.  All these
>possibilities get mixed together, sometimes in contradictory ways.
>What about AI?  Surely computer aided design will be much farther along,
>and even if Moore's Law stops working in the next decade, nanotech could
>put us back on track. ...
>Likewise for robotics?
>What will these imply for labor?  How will people work, what will they
>do?  What will happen if the demand for labor begins dropping by several
>percent per year or even faster, over a multi-year period? ...

What if aliens show up?  What if time-travelers from the future come back?
It seems to me to make the most sense to choose some sort of baseline
scenario, then analyze each substantial change by itself, and only after
try to combine these scenarios.  So let's assume, for the purpose of
analyzing nanotech, that automation progresses over the next few decades at
a similar pace and character as it has over the last few decades.

>PGMDs would essentially eliminate transportation, labor and capital costs
>for products.  What else is there?  Design and marketing?

As I said before, whether it eliminates capital costs depends crucially
on the cost of creating PGMDs, and on whether they are used to capacity.

>Even if we keep factories, presumably the same improved efficiencies
>in the manufacuring process can apply to transportation and any other
>costs which can be further automated or made more efficient.

I don't see why we should presume this.  Progress in one area does not
imply the same progress in other areas.

>What exactly are the PGMDs building all day?  Could we reach a state
>of satiation, where we simply can't consume as much as our machines can
>produce?  What would that imply for the economy?  Or would we always be
>in a situation of scarcity?

You are assuming something about how fast these things work.  What if
they worked very slowly?

>Could we have an "open source" economy, where people work on whatever
>interests them, or create designs that satisfy their own needs, then
>make the fruits of their labor available to everyone for free?

The form of the market for designs seems a separate issue.  Logically,
you could have ordinary factories and open source design, or you could
have PGMDs and profit-motivated copyrighted designs.

>What if nanotech ultimately drives capital costs to near zero, eliminates
>labor as a component of manufacturing costs, drastically reduces design
>costs, and similarly makes every economic factor tremendously cheaper?
>What does the resulting economy look like?
>If nanotech really does all this, then whether it happens in one year
>or twenty years, you're going to have major dislocations.  I think it
>would be useful to see an economic analysis of the economy in a mature
>nanotech era like this.  Maybe it is obvious to an economist, but it is
>hard for a non-specialist to see how all the pieces would fit together,
>when everything is so different from what we are used to.

Sure, if pigs can fly, the sky is going to look different.  But we need
to do the analysis step by step, and not jump too quickly to big conclusions.




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