I’m not a domain expert in micromachines, but have studied at least miniature machines as part of a previous job.
One very big problem is volume. Once you get down below tonne scale, making and assembling small parts with fine tolerances is not really any less expensive than making and assembling larger parts with comparatively the same tolerances.
That is, each one-gram machine made of a thousand parts probably won’t cost you any less than a hundred-kilogram machine made of a thousand parts. It will almost certainly cost more, since it will require new techniques to make, assemble, and operate at the smaller scale. The cost of maintenance per machine almost certainly goes up since there are more layers of indirection in diagnosis and rectification of problems.
So this doesn’t scale down at all: attention is a limiting factor. With advanced extrapolations from current techniques, maybe we could eventually make nanogram robot arms for merely the same cost as hundred kilogram robot arms. That doesn’t help much if each one costs $10,000 and needs maintenance every few weeks. We need some way to make a trillion of them for $10k, and for them to do what we want without any individual attention at all.
making and assembling small parts with fine tolerances is not really any less expensive than making and assembling larger parts with comparatively the same tolerances.
I wasn’t ever involved with manufacture of the individual parts, so I don’t have direct experience.
I suspect it’s just that as you go smaller, material costs become negligible compared with process costs. Process costs don’t change much, because you still need humans to oversee the machines carrying out the processes, and there are similar numbers of processes with as many steps involved no matter how large or small the parts are. The processes themselves might be different, because some just can’t scale down below a certain size for physics reasons, but it doesn’t get easier at smaller scales.
Also, direct human labour still plays a fairly crucial role in most processes. There are (so far) always some things to be done where human capabilities exceed those of any machine we can build at reasonable cost.
I’m not a domain expert in micromachines, but have studied at least miniature machines as part of a previous job.
One very big problem is volume. Once you get down below tonne scale, making and assembling small parts with fine tolerances is not really any less expensive than making and assembling larger parts with comparatively the same tolerances.
That is, each one-gram machine made of a thousand parts probably won’t cost you any less than a hundred-kilogram machine made of a thousand parts. It will almost certainly cost more, since it will require new techniques to make, assemble, and operate at the smaller scale. The cost of maintenance per machine almost certainly goes up since there are more layers of indirection in diagnosis and rectification of problems.
So this doesn’t scale down at all: attention is a limiting factor. With advanced extrapolations from current techniques, maybe we could eventually make nanogram robot arms for merely the same cost as hundred kilogram robot arms. That doesn’t help much if each one costs $10,000 and needs maintenance every few weeks. We need some way to make a trillion of them for $10k, and for them to do what we want without any individual attention at all.
Seems like the key claim:
Can you give any hint why that is or could be?
I wasn’t ever involved with manufacture of the individual parts, so I don’t have direct experience.
I suspect it’s just that as you go smaller, material costs become negligible compared with process costs. Process costs don’t change much, because you still need humans to oversee the machines carrying out the processes, and there are similar numbers of processes with as many steps involved no matter how large or small the parts are. The processes themselves might be different, because some just can’t scale down below a certain size for physics reasons, but it doesn’t get easier at smaller scales.
Also, direct human labour still plays a fairly crucial role in most processes. There are (so far) always some things to be done where human capabilities exceed those of any machine we can build at reasonable cost.