[extropy-chat] Social Implications of Nanotech - more

[Damien Broderick]

Okay, here's the chunk from THE SPIKE (fwiw):

Meanwhile, will nanoassembly allow the rich to get richer--to hug this magic
cornucopia to their selfish breasts--while the poor get poorer? Why should
it be so? Even in a world of 10 billion flesh-and-blood humans (ignoring the
uploads for now), there's plenty of space for everyone to own decent
housing, transport, clothing, arts, music, sporting opportunities... once we
grant the ready availability of nano mints. This issue has been analyzed to
surprising effect by Robert J. Bradbury.179 Over the last 10,000 years, he
notes, human activity has added 185 petagrams of carbon to the atmosphere,
about 31,000 kilos for each person now alive. Using assemblers in a fair,
ecologically responsible fashion, what can you get by extracting that excess
carbon and reusing it to build a house and other consumer desirables? And
how long would it take to compile the goodies?
           Start by buying between two and eight acres of cheap land,
depending on your latitude and cloud cover. Your nano compiler will grow you
solar cells that cover most of the land, providing 400,000 watts a day,
powering the compilation of around 10 kilos of materials per hour.
(Calculations by Robert Freitas, who allows only 100 kilowatts per person--
stringently restricting the total mass and energy of
nano-constructors--would thus imply an average of four people per large
house.)180 Feedstocks from air and soil are almost free. Make your daily
food in the first quarter hour. Very conservatively, a 2600 square foot
house (34,000 kilos) will take five months to grow and assemble. Build a
huge swimming pool as part of the assembly, as a by-product of mining
aluminum for sapphire modules and maybe as a heat sink for another big
project: since there's a lot of silicon in the rock along with that
aluminum, build a million-kilo basement computer to run the place and handle
your eventual upload. Its waste heat will warm your pool. A Bill Gates
mansion, Bradbury estimates, would take a little over eight years to build.
Not an overnight miracle, but then again it took Gates more than eight
years' work, starting from scratch, to get wealthy enough to build his. When
can we expect this? With open-source and other non-profit development of the
software, `between 2020 and 2030.'
           Sounds mad. Actually, friendly critics swiftly pointed out that
Bradbury's 1999 estimates might be too cautious by a factor of 100. If so,
you could build your mansion in three weeks, at the cost of chewing up more
power, and spend some of the saved time compiling the yacht (or maybe the
one-stage surface-to-space diamond rocket). But that way you'd need to buy
the rarer feedstock components from a mining company or utility, an option
that still might be quite inexpensive in today's terms. Is there an
additional cost in global heat pollution? Robert Freitas examined the
`hypsithermal limit' (planetary heat tolerance), deriving daily safe limits
of between 100 and 1000 kilowatts per person.  Bradbury, recall, opted for
400 KW. But with all that excess carbon being drained from the atmosphere,
putting the Greenhouse effect conveniently into reverse, we might need all
the heat we can get. Entire international law-making empires will arise to
adjudicate these matters, no doubt, giving many displaced lawyers something
to do (until they are replaced by smart AI agents and legal expert systems).
           Why would the rich permit the poor to own the machineries of
freedom from want? Some adduce benevolence, others prudence. Above all,
perhaps, is the basic law of an information/knowledge economy: the more
people who are thinking and solving and inventing and finding the bugs and
figuring out the patches, the better a nano minting world is for everyone
(just as it is for an open source AI computing world). Besides, how could
they stop us? (Well, by brute force, or in the name of all that's decent, or
for our own moral good. None of these methods will long prevail in a world
of free-flowing information and cheap material assembly. Even China has
trouble keeping dissidents and mystics silenced.)
           The big necessary step is the prior development of early nano
assemblers, and we have seen that this will be funded by university and
corporate (and military) money for researchers, as well as by increasing
numbers of private investors who see the marginal pay-offs in owning a piece
of each consecutive improvement in micro- and nano-scale devices. So yes,
the rich will get richer--but the poor will get richer too, as by and large
they do now, in the developed world at least. Not as rich, of course, nor as
fast. By the time the nano and AI revolutions have attained maturity, these
classifications will have shifted ground. Economists insist that rich and
poor will still be with us, but the metric will have changed so drastically,
so strangely, that we here-and-now can make little sense of it.

179.  In a discussion on the extropian email list, in the thread
`Understanding Nanotech' begun on 26 August 1999.
180.  Robert Freitas, Nanomedicine, Vol I, 1999, p 175.