[extropy-chat] Social Implications of Nanotech

[Robin Hanson]

OK, here is my current attempt to distinguish the key assumptions and what 
they imply.

The social implications of nanotech depend greatly on which specific 
economic assumptions hold.

1.  Atomic Precision:  Atom-scale manufacturing becomes cheap; we put atoms 
where we want.

Such abilities should allow many new products, including much cheaper and 
smaller computers, medical devices that float in bloodstreams, and thorough 
waste recycling.

2.  General Plants:  General purpose manufacturing plants, using a limited 
range of feedstocks, will displace most special purpose plants, like 
general purpose computers have now displaced most special purpose signal 
processing.  (This is mature "3D printing" or "direct manufacturing.")

As with computers, this requires that the added efficiencies of special 
purpose devices are overcome by the scale economies and reduced design 
costs of general purpose devices.

For products with substantial transportation costs, production should be 
done at the general plants nearest to each customer.  Such plants can exist 
anywhere where feedstocks, repair skills, and customers are available.

3.  Local Production:  Small general plants, located very near users, 
dominate manufacturing.

This requires that production designs be almost fully automated, only very 
rarely requiring human intervention. Such automated production processes 
should be harder to design.

Here distribution and labor costs of manufacturing are mostly eliminated; 
what remain are the costs of design, marketing, regulation, raw materials, 
and to rent general plants.  Open source product design is possible here, 
and file-sharing of stolen product designs becomes an issue.

4.  Over-Capacity:  Local general plants are so fast/cheap they are usually 
off, like PCs now.

At this point the marginal cost of most products is raw materials and 
marketing.  The fixed costs of design and regulation dominate the overall 
costs, much as with software/music/movies today.

The scope for price-discrimination would be wider.  Today software and 
cable TV companies offer a few wide product bundles, to take advantage of 
anti-correlation in our item values.  Imagine being offered a few 
lifestylepackages, that cost most of your salary and entitle you to use a 
very wide range of consumer product designs, including clothes, furniture, 
food, etc  This would require an incredible concentration of or 
coordination by sellers of consumer goods.

5.  Self-Reproduction:  A local manufacturing plant can create a copy of 
itself within a year.

This is one possible route to achieving over-capacity of local general 
plants. This route, however, has the potential to give a large and sudden 
cost advantage to the commercial or military power that first develops full 
self-reproduction.  How large depends on prior costs, and how sudden 
depends on reproduction time.  Self-reproducing military or terrorist 
weapons are also a concern.



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