[extropy-chat] Social Implications of Nanotech

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 05:03:06AM +1000, Alejandro Dubrovsky wrote:

> 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.

If we have a device with a self-replication rate of a couple of days, it can
clearly double that output in the same time frame. The limit is feedstock and
energy, but we obviously can fab photovoltaics, rectenna arrays, processing
plants, space transporters (planetary surface is a scarce resource, there's a lot of
volume, minables and solar flux/square area in the local system, though).

The limit to this are resource ownership (land, space transport, circumsolar
objects) monopolies, which would attempt to keep costs up by creating
artificial scarcities. This is not sustainable, as it would result in armed
conflicts, including nuclear and worse.
 
> > 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 

Designs are information, and rather compact. Open designs are as free as open
source.  Their transfer costs are basically free (each user is a part of the
network infrastructure). The only real cost factor
is fabbing costs, which are dominated by cost of feedstock and energy. Both
can be derived from land. Both feedstock and energy are plentiful outside of
gravity wells.

> > 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 

The design cost only figures once in the calculation. Write once, run
everywhere. 

> > ordinary ones around before any self-reproducing ones appear, minimizing 
> > the social impact of this transition.

Please tell me how the social impact of superhuman AI runaway can be
minimized by prior availability of chess computers and video games.

What kind of analysis is that? If if if. If pigs would fly, what would be
impact of precipitating feces on aquaculture, and erosion of high-tension
masts? I mean, really.

> 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.

Why don't we just wait, and see? A precursor to a nanolithoprinter is lot
like an inkjet on steroids. It only fabs slowly, has very limited structure and
material repertoire, and is expensive, as it can't self reproduce. The impact
of this device in straightforward analysis should be nil, right? Sure, as
long as we assume it can't produce molecular circuitry. What is the impact if
Jane and Joe Doe could fab their prototypes for about the same costs it takes
to print a color photo? I'm not sure how classical economic theory handles
a series of punctuated equilibria. There's extensive documentation available,
though: the fossil record. 


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