I think you’re substantially underestimating the difficulty here, and the proportion of effort which goes into the “starter pack” (aka vitamins) relative to steelworking.
If you’re interested in taking this further, I’d suggest:
initially focusing on just one of producing parts, assembling parts, or controlling machinery. If your system works when teleoperated, or can assemble but not produce a copy of itself, etc., that’s already a substantial breakthrough.
While the “autofac” might not be feasible at this time, it’s interesting to consider how to minimize the required size of a civilization that’s productive enough to survive on eg Mars or an asteroid.
To be clear, I think the autofac concept—with external “vitamins” for electronics etc—is in fact technically feasible right now and if teleoperated has been for decades. It’s not economically competitive, but that’s a totally different target.
I think you’re substantially underestimating the difficulty here,
I thought I was pretty careful not to say how hard I estimated the difficulty to be, but just to be clear: I think it will be a large project and many years of effort. Can you point to a place where you got the opposite impression? Or was it my breezy style?
and the proportion of effort which goes into the “starter pack” (aka vitamins) relative to steelworking.
I too was surprised by how large the steel input was compared to the vitamins, and in turn how much of that was lubricant relative to everything else. I got these proportions by scaling off the US economy as a whole. Compared to how much steel we consume, the vitamins are really that small a fraction. It also seems like a reasonable fraction of non-steel parts in a bunch of machine tools in a metal box. Of course those vitamins are far more valuable per kilogram compared to the steel.
initially focusing on just one of producing parts, assembling parts, or controlling machinery. If your system works when teleoperated, or can assemble but not produce a copy of itself, etc., that’s already a substantial breakthrough.
Thank you for your suggestions of how to demonstrate only part of the system; I’ve been trying to come up with a minimum viable product that is less difficult to get to. I’m an old guy, not in the full flower of my health, so I’m gonna let someone else build the startup company to do the whole job.
Thanks for the reference to Chirikjian 2004; I wasn’t aware of that one.
I’m just guessing from affect, yep, though I still think that “large project and many years of effort” typically describes considerably smaller challenges than my expectation for producing a complete autofac.
On the steel-vs-vitamins question, I’m thinking about “effort”—loose proxy measurements would be the sale value or production headcount rather than kilograms of output. Precisely because steel is easier to transform, it’s much less valuable to do so and thus I expect the billions-of-autofacs to be far less economically valuable than a quick estimate might show. Unless of course they start edging in on vitamin production, but then that’s the hard rest-of-the-industrial-economy problem...
Isn’t the US a bit too dependent on “Vitamin Xi” and “Vitamin T[aiwan]” (I amuse myself) for the electronics for these naive estimates based on the U.S. economy to work out too well? We’d have to find a way to carve out a part of the global economy that is basically self sufficient and very plausibly reproducible i.e. able to replace all critical aspects of itself once they run out their lifetimes without a substantial degradation of technology, and I can only imagine a claim of a self-reproducing subsection of (or just the entire) global economy to be very controversial due to predictions of a collapse or massive change to globalization, breakdown in U.S.-China trade relations, an invasion of Taiwan, worries of economic, societal and technological collapse, etc.
I think you’re substantially underestimating the difficulty here, and the proportion of effort which goes into the “starter pack” (aka vitamins) relative to steelworking.
If you’re interested in taking this further, I’d suggest:
getting involved in the RepRap project
initially focusing on just one of producing parts, assembling parts, or controlling machinery. If your system works when teleoperated, or can assemble but not produce a copy of itself, etc., that’s already a substantial breakthrough.
reading up on NASA’s studies on self-replicating machinery, e.g. Freitas 1981 or this paper from 1982 or later work like Chirikjian 2004.
While the “autofac” might not be feasible at this time, it’s interesting to consider how to minimize the required size of a civilization that’s productive enough to survive on eg Mars or an asteroid.
To be clear, I think the autofac concept—with external “vitamins” for electronics etc—is in fact technically feasible right now and if teleoperated has been for decades. It’s not economically competitive, but that’s a totally different target.
I thought I was pretty careful not to say how hard I estimated the difficulty to be, but just to be clear: I think it will be a large project and many years of effort. Can you point to a place where you got the opposite impression? Or was it my breezy style?
I too was surprised by how large the steel input was compared to the vitamins, and in turn how much of that was lubricant relative to everything else. I got these proportions by scaling off the US economy as a whole. Compared to how much steel we consume, the vitamins are really that small a fraction. It also seems like a reasonable fraction of non-steel parts in a bunch of machine tools in a metal box. Of course those vitamins are far more valuable per kilogram compared to the steel.
Thank you for your suggestions of how to demonstrate only part of the system; I’ve been trying to come up with a minimum viable product that is less difficult to get to. I’m an old guy, not in the full flower of my health, so I’m gonna let someone else build the startup company to do the whole job.
Thanks for the reference to Chirikjian 2004; I wasn’t aware of that one.
I’m just guessing from affect, yep, though I still think that “large project and many years of effort” typically describes considerably smaller challenges than my expectation for producing a complete autofac.
On the steel-vs-vitamins question, I’m thinking about “effort”—loose proxy measurements would be the sale value or production headcount rather than kilograms of output. Precisely because steel is easier to transform, it’s much less valuable to do so and thus I expect the billions-of-autofacs to be far less economically valuable than a quick estimate might show. Unless of course they start edging in on vitamin production, but then that’s the hard rest-of-the-industrial-economy problem...
Isn’t the US a bit too dependent on “Vitamin Xi” and “Vitamin T[aiwan]” (I amuse myself) for the electronics for these naive estimates based on the U.S. economy to work out too well? We’d have to find a way to carve out a part of the global economy that is basically self sufficient and very plausibly reproducible i.e. able to replace all critical aspects of itself once they run out their lifetimes without a substantial degradation of technology, and I can only imagine a claim of a self-reproducing subsection of (or just the entire) global economy to be very controversial due to predictions of a collapse or massive change to globalization, breakdown in U.S.-China trade relations, an invasion of Taiwan, worries of economic, societal and technological collapse, etc.