[extropy-chat] Re: Towards Self-Replicating Rapid Prototypers

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com> wrote:
> A partial solution that builds most of the machine and requires you
> to
> purchase feedstock & components like chips and motors is a pretty
> good
> first shot.

Problem is, this much has previously been accomplished.  And quite a
few potential uses for self-rep can't be done if you have to supply
non-feedstock items.  However...

> If that can come down to a reasonable cost, the
> technology
> will be sitting there waiting for improvements to allow fabrication
> of
> the more complex parts in good time, and it will also get the
> self-replication meme out there. To me, the big advance here may not
> be technical so much as social; getting these machines into price
> range of an expensive home printer could change the way our society
> works quite interestingly.

...you have a very good point.  If it helps bring about true self-rep,
then that's good.  (Especially if all the components are standard
commodities - for instance, no chips designed just for this machine,
but standard chips made by several different manufacturers.
"Commodity" is not that far from "feedstock", in places where shipping
a commodity is not a problem.)

> I'm imagining a suburbia where every house has a big clunky
> fridge-sized self rep machine, and perhaps a similarly bulky fuel
> cell
> based power source (or maybe even one of those atomic power sources
> from 50s sci fi?). What happens next?
> 
> With the presence of the 'net, one imagines that better and better
> designs come out, incremental (and some discontinuous) improvements
> in
> self-fab technology turn up, and slowly the major areas of
> manufacturing find themselves competing with these machines.

The device would have to be easy to reconfigure so that it didn't just
produce copies of itself, but that's probably more of a software tweak
than a hardware tweak.

> I reckon it'd take a decade or two for the machines to become good
> enough to really be usable by anyone (think home PC revolution, 80s
> and 90s), and for general attitudes to begin to shift from the
> consumer mindset to the maker mindset.

3D printers already exist, although they have problems creating things
made from the metals they are made from.

> This clunky technology could imply some *really very large* social
> change. A change probably bigger than that of the "information
> revolution". What kind of pushback will we get from existing
> industry,
> whose revenue base is threatened by this? What happens to consumer
> goods as they slowly begin to become information rather than
> manufactured product?

We're already seeing that today.  Witness CNC machines and 3D printers.

At first, the industry tries to make an industry out of the new
gadgets.  "They're expensive" or "you need lots of training to be able
to get much out of them" are perhaps the two most common excuses, and
for a while they're true.  But they also become self-perpetuating
myths (and contributing to this perpetuation could be seen as part of
the industry's pushback).  When those shatter, the industry retreats
into whatever pieces remain: in this case, screw/bushing/motor
fabrication, or possibly the design and licensing of new plans for
tools.  (Hello, DRM; who gets to issue the licenses for wrenches?)

But in this case, the industry has one advantage that may never go
away: mass production.  If their supply and distribution chain is such
that they can get a screw to you for 2 cents, while ordering the
feedstock, setting things up, and adding in the amortized cost of the
fabricator would mean the screw costs you 3 cents, it's still more cost
effective to go with the traditional manufacturer.

Which points to two avenues of economic competition: get the cost of
the fabricator itself (including learning how to use it effectively)
down, and work out the logistics to supply everyone who has one with
feedstock at a reasonable cost.