naively assuming linear returns to medical research funding
Likely the returns in medical research would be not even close to linear. The Law of diminishing returns will hit you hard. Spending 10x more on research will likely net you far less than a 10x increase, you would likely be lucky if you got half or a quarter of that. Science comes in steps and part of the process that reduces so much waste is peer reviewing and replication of results. Some processes simply cannot be sped up, regardless of funding. Even with infinite funding, I would be impressed to see a 10x growth.
My main question to you is:
Why is it better to have a million robots that are all able to do “X” and build themselves instead of one factory that builds robots and a million robots that do “X”?
Obviously replication in certain circumstances is very useful (mars/space exploration for example where “shipping costs” are not only astronomically expensive but nearly impossible on large scale). In the same way 3D printers are useful not because they can replicate themselves (the cant), but because they can create custom things in short amounts of time wherever and whenever they are needed. It is because the jobs they are doing is small scale that they are efficient. You can ship one thing and have it create 100s of other things.
Spending 10x more on research will likely net you far less than a 10x increase, you would likely be lucky if you got half or a quarter of that.
I’d really like to see published research on this. I did some searching and found that there’s a lot of uncertainty because the problem isn’t well-defined (different research has different values), it’s hard to experiment with (very long lead-times), and there’s no political value in knowing the truth (research spending is politically equivalent to highway repair spending). No one even really knows the value of current research.
Science comes in steps and part of the process that reduces so much waste is peer reviewing and replication of results. Some processes simply cannot be sped up, regardless of funding.
Research isn’t a defined process (there are different ways to get to useful results), and people respond to incentives...it’s possible (though very unlikely) that a 10x increase in research funding would have more than a 10x improvement due to attracting much more productive researchers who currently go to better-paid industries.
It’s cheaper in some situations (hard to say which without a design study), due to reducing shipping costs (as you note), maintenance costs, and cost to scale production up or down.
For “better”, well, it puts the project within reach of a small team of inventors/hobbyists with minimal funding, and allows everyone who buys a self-replicating robot to own a bit of the means of production. The alternative, monolithic non-self-replicating factories, are usually owned by amoral narcissists who succeeded in a highly political company, and the technologies produced are typically licensed, not sold. I’d rather be an owner than a subletter.
Likely the returns in medical research would be not even close to linear. The Law of diminishing returns will hit you hard. Spending 10x more on research will likely net you far less than a 10x increase, you would likely be lucky if you got half or a quarter of that. Science comes in steps and part of the process that reduces so much waste is peer reviewing and replication of results. Some processes simply cannot be sped up, regardless of funding. Even with infinite funding, I would be impressed to see a 10x growth.
My main question to you is: Why is it better to have a million robots that are all able to do “X” and build themselves instead of one factory that builds robots and a million robots that do “X”?
Obviously replication in certain circumstances is very useful (mars/space exploration for example where “shipping costs” are not only astronomically expensive but nearly impossible on large scale). In the same way 3D printers are useful not because they can replicate themselves (the cant), but because they can create custom things in short amounts of time wherever and whenever they are needed. It is because the jobs they are doing is small scale that they are efficient. You can ship one thing and have it create 100s of other things.
I’d really like to see published research on this. I did some searching and found that there’s a lot of uncertainty because the problem isn’t well-defined (different research has different values), it’s hard to experiment with (very long lead-times), and there’s no political value in knowing the truth (research spending is politically equivalent to highway repair spending). No one even really knows the value of current research.
Research isn’t a defined process (there are different ways to get to useful results), and people respond to incentives...it’s possible (though very unlikely) that a 10x increase in research funding would have more than a 10x improvement due to attracting much more productive researchers who currently go to better-paid industries.
It’s cheaper in some situations (hard to say which without a design study), due to reducing shipping costs (as you note), maintenance costs, and cost to scale production up or down.
For “better”, well, it puts the project within reach of a small team of inventors/hobbyists with minimal funding, and allows everyone who buys a self-replicating robot to own a bit of the means of production. The alternative, monolithic non-self-replicating factories, are usually owned by amoral narcissists who succeeded in a highly political company, and the technologies produced are typically licensed, not sold. I’d rather be an owner than a subletter.