[extropy-chat] Why no assembler design?

[Hal Finney]

Why is it that, after all these years, there is still no detailed
design for a molecular assembler, one capable of self-reproduction?

Here are a few possible but mutually exclusive answers:

1. There is still considerable science to be done in order to learn how
atoms and molecules behave in the detail necessary to design an assembler.

2. The science is known, but designing an assembler would be an enormous
task due to its incredible complexity, taking hundreds or thousands of
man years, and no one can afford to expend that effort.

3. Designing an assembler would not be enormously complex, but it would
still require a considerable investment in state of the art hardware
and software tools, as well as engineering manpower, and no company
has been willing to do that.

4. Designing an assembler is relatively straightforward and it is clear
that it could be done today with a modest effort, but since there is no
way to build the resulting device, no one wants to go to the effort of
coming up with a complete assembler design.


Answers 3 and 4 assume that merely designing an assembler is pointless;
rather, effort should be devoted to designing an assembler which can be
built from simpler tools, which is much more difficult.  Nevertheless it
would seem that if the situation were close to case 4, it might be a
worthwhile exercise just to make the technological potential more obvious.

I'd be interested to hear opinions about where we actually are along
this spectrum, or other possibilities that I haven't considered.

Hal