[extropy-chat] Social Implications of Nanotech

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Nov 16, 2003 at 08:12:32AM -0500, Robin Hanson wrote:
> 
> Energy is probably around 1-2% of GDP, while medicine is about 14% in the 
> US.  Solar energy collection doesn't need atomic precision - what other 

Making polymer PV doesn't take self-reproduction as long as the costs are
about the costs for sheet plastic, but installing it becomes cost-dominant
then. A self-replicating photosynthetic system can cover large land areas
quickly for negligible cost, creating a huge resource base for feedstock,
energy, fabbing, signalling, and transportation.

Cheap polymer PV is a major piece of good news, but it's not a world-changer.
Artificial trees, now we're talking.

> energy generation do you have in mind?
> 
> >>... As with PCs today, open source product design and file sharing of 
> >>stolen product designs could become issues.
> >
> >... The term "stolen" is value-laden.
> 
> Perhaps, but I don't see another term that so connotes the issue.  I grant 
> that file-sharing of copyrighted material may be a good thing, but it is 
> clearly theft under current law and widely recognized as such.

I'm reading this thread backwards, so I don't know what its origin is.
A lot of online content is content libre; IP protection is trivial to
implement with DRM technologies. There's clearly a niche for both open and
commercial content out there.
 
> If you think the (marginal) cost of energy might go to zero, then unless 
> you have a story about how the (marginal) cost of marketing goes to zero, I 

If I start giving away platinum bars on the marketplace, you can assume that news will propagate
through the body of my potential customers with record speed. My marketing
budget is zero: it's all propagates along the network of my potential
customers.

Let's say I want to fabricate a specific widget, I ask a search engine (or go
to http://opencores.org or my cybertribe, or whomever) and find a design 
I then download and produce. This is an transaction first involving
information transfer, then purchase of energy and feedstock. 

> don't see how you can be confident that the cost of energy is the larger 
> cost.

If all the other costs have disappeared (not for luxury items, but that's not
the point of debate), the cost for energy and feedstock
must become the dominant one. If I pay some ~EUR for one liter of liquid
hydrocarbon (feedstock and energy source), then that's a lot of costs,
especially if I'm building a large plant, or a space vehicle.
 
> >It is very difficult ot construct a "radical MNT" scenario that does not 
> >result in self-reproduction of local manufacturing. Therefore, it is not 
> >clear that this is a primary assumption. I take this as a consequence of 
> >assumptions 1 and 2.
> 
> Even if it does eventually, there may be an important time duration before 
> then.  The design problem may be very hard, after all.

Sure, that's the whole point of a phase transition. Things stay as they are
for a very long time, then they change suddenly. Most of the old rules are no
longer true.

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