[extropy-chat] Social Implications of Nanotech

[Alejandro Dubrovsky]

On Tue, 2003-11-11 at 04:12, Robin Hanson wrote:
> 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.
> 
Would production time really be a very important factor?  Unless the
production of items extends to multi-day efforts, i don't see this
affecting much at the consumer end.  I agree with both other factors.

> 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.
> 
I'd guess that it'd would change the service market which subsists on
the delivery of the manufactured goods (ie transport, and more
importantly, retail) since both are likely to become less important if
not superfluous.  Both of these sectors, i assume, are a rather larger
chunk of the economy.  With regards to the percentage of manufacturing
costs saved, labor, in a fully automated system ala Diamond Age
dissapears, and design costs are affected in the same way that
L/GPLed,BSDed software affects the software world (which i suppose isn't
really that much, but my guess would be that in the manufacturing world
the impact would be greater since the network effect isn't as strong in
a chair/speakers/dishwasher/robotic cook as it is in a spreadsheet, so
it wouldn't present as high a barrier for end users to move over).
(this of course ignores all indirect effects that would almost certainly
popup (facilitation of robot manufacturing (which would affect lots of
other sectors), facilitation of massive amounts of computing power,
facilitation of energy-producing elements (assuming the energy cost of
producing these is lower than their output))

> 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.
> 
Depends on the cost of the ordinary PGMD.  If it can be made by
specialised factories for the cost of say, a car or 3d-printer or lower,
then i'd imagine it would reach saturation quite quickly (using
"saturation" quite loosely, and estimating at one per house).  (btw, all
this referring to the US and other rich nations only).  Also, it'd be a
very contrived case for the PGMDs not to have at least a partial
positive feedback effect on the lowering of their cost.

alejandro