This was a very interesting post. A few scattered thoughts, as I try to take a step back and take a big-picture economic view of this idea:
What is an autofac? It is a vastly simplified economy, in the hopes that enough simplification will unlock various big gains (like gains from “automation”). Let’s interpolate between the existing global economy, and Feynman’s proposed 1-meter cube. It’s not true that “the smallest technological system capable of physical self-reproduction is the entire economy.”, since I can imagine many potential simplifications of the economy. Imagine a human economy with everything the same, but no pianos, piano manufacturers, piano instructors, etc… the world would be a little sadder without pianos, but eliminating everything piano-related would slightly simplify the economy and probably boost overall productivity. The dream of the Autofac involves many more such simplifications, of several types:
Eliminate luxuries (like pianos) and unnecessary complexity (do we really need 1000 types of car, instead of say, 5? The existence of so many different car manufacturers and car models is an artifact of capitalist competition and consumer preferences, not a physical necessity. Similarly, do we really need more than 5 different colors of paint / types of food / etc...).
Give up on internal production of certain highly complex products, like microchips, in order to further simplify the economy. Keep giving up on more and more categories of complex products until your remaining internal economy is simple enough that you can automate the entire thing. Hopefully, this remaining automated economy will still account for most of the mass/energy being manipulated, with only a small amount of imports (lubricants, electronics, etc) required.
Why make such a fuss about disentangling a “fully automatable” simplified subset of the economy from a distant “home base” that exports microchips and lubricant? I don’t think a self-sufficient autofac plan would ever make sense in the middle of, say, the city of Shenzhen in China, when you are already surrounded by an incredibly complex manufacturing ecosystem that can easily provide whatever inputs you need. I can think of two reasons why you might want to cleave an economy in half like this, rather than just cluster everything together in a normal Shenzhen-style agglomeration mishmash:
If you want to industrialize a distant, undeveloped location, and the cost of shipping goods there is very high, then it makes sense to focus on producing the heaviest materials locally and importing the smallest / most complex / most value-per-kg stuff.
If you can cut humans entirely out of the loop of the simplified half of the economy, then you don’t have to import or produce any of the stuff humans need (food, housing, healthcare, etc), which is a big efficiency win. This looks especially attractive if you want to industrialize a harsh, uninhabitable location (like Baffin Island, Antarctica, the Sahara desert, the bottom of the ocean, the moon, Mars, etc), where the costs of supporting humans are higher than normal.
Take an efficency hit in order to eliminate efficiency-boosting complexity. Perhaps instead of myriad types of alloy, we could get by with just a handful. Perhaps instead of myriad types of fastener, we could just use four standard sizes of screw. Perhaps instead of lots of specialized machines, we could make many of our tools “by hand” using generalized machine-shop tools.
But wait—I thought we were trying to maximize economic growth? Why give up things like carbide cutting tools in favor of inferior hardened-steel? Well, the hope is that if we simplify the economy enough, it will be possible to “automate” this simplified economy, and the benefits of this automation will make up for the efficiency losses.
Okay then, why does efficiency-imparing simplification help with automation? Couldn’t our autofac machine shop just as easily produce 10,000 types of fasteners, as 4 standard screws? Especially since the autofacs are making so many things “by hand?” Feynman seems very interested in an Autofac economy based almost entirely around steel—what’s the benefit of ditching useful materials like plastic, concrete, carbide, glass, rubber, etc? I see a few potential benefits to efficiency-imparing simplifications:
lt reduces the size/cost/complexity of the initial self-replicating system. (I think this motivation is misplaced, and we should be shooting for a much larger initial size than 1 meter cubed.)
It reduces the engineering effort needed to design the initial self-replicating system. (This motivation is reasonable, but it interacts in interesting ways with AI.)
By trying to minimize the use of inputs like rubber and plastic, we reduce our reliance on rare natural resources like rubber trees and oil wells, neither of which exist on Baffin Island, or the moon, or etc. (This motivation is reasonable, but it only applies to a few of the proposed simplifications.)
To me, it seems that the Autofac dream comes from a particular context—mid-20th-century visions of space exploration—that have unduly influenced Feynman’s current concept.
Why the emphasis on creating a very small, 1 meter cubed package size?? This is a great size for something that we are shipping to the moon on a Saturn V rocket, or landing on Mars via skycrane, or perhaps sending to a distant star system as a Von Neumann probe. But for colonizing Baffin Island or the Sahara Desert or anywhere else on earth, we can use giant containter ships to easily move a much larger amount of stuff. By increasing the minimum size of our self-replicating system, we can include lots of efficiency-boosting nice-to-haves (like different types of alloys, carbide cutting tools, lubricant factories, etc). Feynman imagines initially releasing 1000 one-meter-cubed autofacs (and then supporting them with a continual stream of inputs), but I think we should instead design a single, 1000x-size autofac (it doesn’t have to be one giant structure—rather a network of factories, resource-gathering drones, steel mills, power plants, etc), since that would allow for more efficiency-boosting complexity.
The remaining argument for 1000 one-meter-cubed autofacs is that it would be easier to design this much-smaller, much-simpler product. This is true! I’ll get back to this in a bit.
In general, I suspect that the ideal size of the autofac system should be proportional to the amount of transportation throughput you can support to Baffin Island / Mars / wherever. Design effort aside, it would be ideal to design the largest and most complex possible autofac which would fit into your transportation budget (eg, if you can afford five container ships to Baffin Island per year, then your autofac system should be large enough to fit into five container ships.
Cutting humans entirely out of the loop is very appealing for deep-space exploration, but less appealing for places like Baffin Island. As long as you are only relying on relatively unskilled labor (such that you aren’t worried about running out of humans to import, during the final stages of the industrialization of the island when millions and millions of windmills / steel mills / etc are going up), then importing a bunch of humans to handle a small percentage of high-value, hard-to-automate tasks, is probably worth it (even though it means you now have to provide housing, food, entertainment, law enforcement, etc).
As others have mentioned, this “compromise” vision seems similar to Tesla’s dreams of robotic factory workers (in large, container-ship-sized factories that still employ some human workers) and Spacex’s mars colonization plans (where you still have a few humans assembling a mostly-mechanical system of nuclear power plants and solar panels, habitable spaces, greenhouses for food, etc—but no 1-meter cubes to be seen, since Starship can carry 100 tons at a time to Mars).
But again, I admit that re-complexifying the economy by introducing humans, does greatly increase the design complexity and thus the design effort required at the beginning.
The one-meter-cubed autofac seems so pleasingly universal, like maybe once we’ve designed it, we could deploy it in all kinds of situations! But I think it is a lot less universal than it looks.
A Baffin-Island-Plan autofac wouldn’t fare well in the Sahara desert, where you’d want to manufacture solar panels (which rely more on chemistry and unique materials) instead of simple mechanical windmills that could be built almost entirely from steel. In the sahara, you’d also have less access to iron ore in the form of exposed rock; by contrast you’d have a lot of sillica that you could use to make glass. On the moon, you’d have no atmosphere at all for wind, and extreme temperatures + vacuum conditions would probably break a lot of the machine-shop tools (eg, liquid lubricants would freeze or sublimate). Etc.
The above point isn’t a fatal problem—just having one autofac system for deserts and another for tundra would cover plenty of use cases for industrializing the unused portions of the earth. But you’d also run into problems when you finished replicating and wanted to use all those Baffin Island autofacs to contribute back to the external, human economy. Probably it would be fine to just have the Baffin Island autofacs build wind turbines and export steel + electricity, while the desert autofacs build solar panels and export glass + electricity. But if you decided that you wanted your Baffin Island autofacs to start growing food, or manufacturing textiles, you would have a big problem. The autofacs would in some ways be more flexible than a human manufacturing economy (eg, because they are doing more things “by hand”, thus could switch to producing other types of steel products very quickly), but in other ways they would be much more rigid than a human manufacturing economy (if you want anything not based on steel, it might be pretty difficult for all the autofacs to reconfigure themselves).
Design effort & AI—if AI is good enough to replace machinists, won’t it be good enough to help design an autofac?
This post reminds me of Carl Shulman’s calculations (eg, on his recent 80,000 Hours podcast appearance) about the world economy’s doubling times, and how fast they could possibly get, based on analogies to biological systems.
Feynman says that, after many years, nowadays the dream of the Autofac is finally coming within reach, because AI is now good enough to operate robotics, navigate the world, use tools, and essentially replace the human machinist in a machine shop. This seems pretty likely come true, maybe in a few years.
But creating such a small, self-contained, simplified autofac seems like it is motivated by the desire to minimize the up-front design effort needed. If AI ever gets good enough to become a drop-in remote worker not just for machinsts, but also for engineers/designers, then design effort is no longer such a big obstacle, and many of the conclusions flip.
Consider how a paperclip-maximising superintelligence would colonize baffin island:
The first image that jumps to mind is one of automated factories tesselated across the terrain. I think this is correct insofar as there would be lots of repetition (the basic idea of industrial production is that you can get economies of scale, cheaply churning out many copies of the same product, when you optimize a factory for producing that product). But I don’t think these would be self-replicating factories.
A superintelligent AI could do lots of design work very quickly, and wouldn’t mind handling an extremely complex economy. I would expect the overall complexity of the global economy to go way up, and the minimum size of a self-replicating system to stay very large (ie, nearly the size of the entire planetary economy), and we just end up shipping lots of stuff to Baffin Island.
If we say that the superintelligence has to start “from scratch” on Baffin Island alone, with only a limited budget for imports, then I’d expect it to start with something that looks like the 1-meter-cubed autofac, but then continually scale up in the size and complexity of its creations over time, rather than creating thousands of identical copies of one optimized design.
A superintelligence-run economy might actually feature much less repetition than a human industrial economy, since the AI can juggle constant design changes and iteration and customization for local conditions, rather than needing to standardize things (as humans do to allow interoperability and reduce the costs of communicating between different humans).
Okay, I will try to sum up these scattered thoughts...
I think that the ideal autofac design for a given situation will vary a lot based on factors like:
what resources are locally available (wind vs solar, etc)
how expensive it is to support humans as part of the design, vs going fully automated
how much it costs to ship things to the location (the more you can ship, the bigger and more complex your autofac should be, other things equal)
the ultimate scale you’re aspiring to industrialize, relative to the size of your initial shipments (if you want to generate maximum energy on 1 acre of land using a 100 tons of payload, you should probably just import a 100-ton nuclear reactor and call it a day, rather than waste a bunch of money trying to design a factory to build a factory to build a nuclear reactor. Wheras if you are trying to generate power over the entire surface of Mars with a 100 ton payload, it is much more important to first create a self-replicating industrial base before you eventually turn towards creating lots of power plants.
how much it costs to design a given autofac system
a larger, more complex autofac will cost more to design, but will be more efficient
a more-completely-self-sufficient system (eg, including lubricant factories, or eliminating the need for humans on Baffin Island) will cost more to design, but will save on shipping costs later
if you can use lots of already-existing designs, that will lower design costs (but it will increase complexity elsewhere, since now you have to manufacture all the 10,000 types of fasteners and alloys and etc used by today’s random equipment designs)
advanced AI might be able to help greatly reduce design costs
A fully-automated “autofac” design wins over a more traditional human-led industrialization effort, where the upfront costs of designing the mostly-self-sufficient autofac system manage to pay for themsleves by lowering the recurring costs of importing stuff, paying employees, etc, of a human-led industrialization effort.
Whoever decides to start the cool autofac startup, should probably spend a bunch of time considering these big-picture economic tradeoffs, trying to figure out what environment (baffin island, the sahara desert, the oceans, the moon, Mars, alpha centauri, etc) offers the most upside from an autofac-style approach (Baffin-Island-like tundra might indeed be the best and most practical spot), and what tradeoffs to make in terms of autofac size/complexity, how much and where to incorporate humans into the system, and etc.
I would personally love to get a better sense of where the efficiencies are really coming from, that help an autofac strategy win vs a human-led industrialization strategy. Contrast the autofac plan with a more traditional effort to have workers build roads and a few factories and erect windmills all over Baffin Island to export electricity—where are the autofac wins coming from? The autofac would seem to have some big disadvantages, like that its windmill blades will be made of heavy steel instead of efficient fiberglass. Are the gains mostly from the fact that we’re not paying as many worker salaries? Or is it mostly from the fact that we’re producing all our heavy materials on-site rather than having to ship them in? Or somewhere else?
Wow, I think that comment is as long as my original essay. Lots of good points. Let me take them one by one.
I see a few potential benefits to efficiency-imparing simplifications:
lt reduces the size/cost/complexity of the initial self-replicating system. (I think this motivation is misplaced, and we should be shooting for a much larger initial size than 1 meter cubed.)
The real motivation for the efficiency-impairing simplifications is none of size, cost or complexity. It is to reduce replication time. We need an Autofac efficient enough that what it produces is higher value than what it consumes. We don’t want to reproduce Soviet industry, much of which processed expensive resources into lousy products worth less than the inputs. Having achieved this minimum, however, the goal is to allow the shortest possible time of replication. This allows for the most rapid production of the millions of tons of machinery needed to produce massive effects.
Consider that the Autofac, 50 kg in a 1 m^3, is modeled on a regular machine shop, with the machinist replaced by a robot. The machine shop is 6250 kg in 125 m^3. I just scale it down by a factor of 5, and thereby reduce the duplication time by a factor of 5. So it duplicates in 5 weeks instead of 25 weeks. Suppose we start the Autofac versus the robot machine shop at the same time. After a year, there are 1000 Autofacs versus 4 machine shops; or in terms of mass, 50,000 kg of Autofac and 25,000 kg of machine shop. After two years, 50,000,000 kg of Autofac versus 100,000 kg of machine shop. After 3 years, it’s even more extreme. At any time, we can turn the Autofacs from making themselves to making what we need, or to making the tools to make what we need. The Autofac wins by orders of magnitude even if it’s teeny and inefficient, because of sheer speed.
That’s why I picked a one meter cube. I would have picked a smaller cube, that reproduced faster, but that would scale various production processes beyond reasonable limits. I didn’t want to venture beyond ordinary machining into weird techniques only watchmakers use.
I see a few potential benefits to efficiency-imparing simplifications:
...
It reduces the engineering effort needed to design the initial self-replicating system.
This is certainly a consideration. Given the phenomenal reproductive capacity of the Autofac, there’s an enormous return to finishing design as quickly as possible and getting something out there.
To me, it seems that the Autofac dream comes from a particular context—mid-20th-century visions of space exploration—that have unduly influenced Feynman’s current concept.
Let me tell you some personal history. I happened upon the concept of self-reproducing machines as a child or teenager, in an old Scientific American from the fifties. This was in the 1970s. That article suggested building a self-reproducing factory boat, that would extract resources from the sea, and soon fill up the oceans and pile up on beaches. It wasn’t a very serious article. Then I went to MIT, in 1979. Self-reproducing machines were in the air—Eric Drexler was theorizing about mechanical bacteria, and NASA was paying people to think about what eventually became the 1981 lunar factory design study. I thought that sending a self-reproducing factory to the asteroid belt was the obvious right thing, and thought about it, in my baby-engineer fantasy way. But I could tell I was ahead of my time, so I turned my attention to supercomputers and robots and AI and other stuff for a few decades.
A few years ago I picked up the idea of self-reproducing boats again. I imagined a windmill on deck for power, and condensing Seacrete and magnesium from the water for materials. There was a machine shop below decks, building all the parts. But I couldn’t make the energy economy work out, even given the endless gales of the Southern Ocean. So I asked myself, what about just the machine shop part? Then I realized the reproduction time was the overriding consideration. How can I figure out the reproduction time? Well, I could estimate the time to do it with a regular human machine shop, and I remembered Eric Drexler’s scaling laws. And wow, five weeks?! That’s short enough to be a really big deal! So, a certain amount of calculation and spreadsheets later, here we are, the Autofac.
I considered varied environments for situating the Autofac:
a laboratory in Boston. Good for development, but doesn’t allow rapid growth.
a field near a railroad and power line in the Midwest. Good for the resource inputs, but the neighbors might reasonably complain when the steel mill starts belching flame, or the Autofacs pile up sky-high.
Baffin Island. Advantages described above.
Antarctic Icecap. Bigger than Baffin, but useful activities are illegal. Shortage of all elements except carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen.
The Moon. Even bigger. Ironically, shortage of carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen. No wind, so the Autofac has to include solar cell manufacture from the git-go. There will be lots of problems understanding vacuum manufacturing. Obvious first step toward Dyson Sphere.
Carbonaceous asteroids. Obvious second step toward Dyson Sphere.
So, I decided to propose an intermediate environment. Obviously, it was rooted in the mid-20th-century visions of space exploration. But that didn’t set the size, or the use of Baffin Island, or anything else really. We’ll build a Dyson Sphere eventually, but I don’t feel the need to do it personally.
This was a very interesting post. A few scattered thoughts, as I try to take a step back and take a big-picture economic view of this idea:
What is an autofac? It is a vastly simplified economy, in the hopes that enough simplification will unlock various big gains (like gains from “automation”). Let’s interpolate between the existing global economy, and Feynman’s proposed 1-meter cube. It’s not true that “the smallest technological system capable of physical self-reproduction is the entire economy.”, since I can imagine many potential simplifications of the economy. Imagine a human economy with everything the same, but no pianos, piano manufacturers, piano instructors, etc… the world would be a little sadder without pianos, but eliminating everything piano-related would slightly simplify the economy and probably boost overall productivity. The dream of the Autofac involves many more such simplifications, of several types:
Eliminate luxuries (like pianos) and unnecessary complexity (do we really need 1000 types of car, instead of say, 5? The existence of so many different car manufacturers and car models is an artifact of capitalist competition and consumer preferences, not a physical necessity. Similarly, do we really need more than 5 different colors of paint / types of food / etc...).
Give up on internal production of certain highly complex products, like microchips, in order to further simplify the economy. Keep giving up on more and more categories of complex products until your remaining internal economy is simple enough that you can automate the entire thing. Hopefully, this remaining automated economy will still account for most of the mass/energy being manipulated, with only a small amount of imports (lubricants, electronics, etc) required.
Why make such a fuss about disentangling a “fully automatable” simplified subset of the economy from a distant “home base” that exports microchips and lubricant? I don’t think a self-sufficient autofac plan would ever make sense in the middle of, say, the city of Shenzhen in China, when you are already surrounded by an incredibly complex manufacturing ecosystem that can easily provide whatever inputs you need. I can think of two reasons why you might want to cleave an economy in half like this, rather than just cluster everything together in a normal Shenzhen-style agglomeration mishmash:
If you want to industrialize a distant, undeveloped location, and the cost of shipping goods there is very high, then it makes sense to focus on producing the heaviest materials locally and importing the smallest / most complex / most value-per-kg stuff.
If you can cut humans entirely out of the loop of the simplified half of the economy, then you don’t have to import or produce any of the stuff humans need (food, housing, healthcare, etc), which is a big efficiency win. This looks especially attractive if you want to industrialize a harsh, uninhabitable location (like Baffin Island, Antarctica, the Sahara desert, the bottom of the ocean, the moon, Mars, etc), where the costs of supporting humans are higher than normal.
Take an efficency hit in order to eliminate efficiency-boosting complexity. Perhaps instead of myriad types of alloy, we could get by with just a handful. Perhaps instead of myriad types of fastener, we could just use four standard sizes of screw. Perhaps instead of lots of specialized machines, we could make many of our tools “by hand” using generalized machine-shop tools.
But wait—I thought we were trying to maximize economic growth? Why give up things like carbide cutting tools in favor of inferior hardened-steel? Well, the hope is that if we simplify the economy enough, it will be possible to “automate” this simplified economy, and the benefits of this automation will make up for the efficiency losses.
Okay then, why does efficiency-imparing simplification help with automation? Couldn’t our autofac machine shop just as easily produce 10,000 types of fasteners, as 4 standard screws? Especially since the autofacs are making so many things “by hand?” Feynman seems very interested in an Autofac economy based almost entirely around steel—what’s the benefit of ditching useful materials like plastic, concrete, carbide, glass, rubber, etc? I see a few potential benefits to efficiency-imparing simplifications:
lt reduces the size/cost/complexity of the initial self-replicating system. (I think this motivation is misplaced, and we should be shooting for a much larger initial size than 1 meter cubed.)
It reduces the engineering effort needed to design the initial self-replicating system. (This motivation is reasonable, but it interacts in interesting ways with AI.)
By trying to minimize the use of inputs like rubber and plastic, we reduce our reliance on rare natural resources like rubber trees and oil wells, neither of which exist on Baffin Island, or the moon, or etc. (This motivation is reasonable, but it only applies to a few of the proposed simplifications.)
To me, it seems that the Autofac dream comes from a particular context—mid-20th-century visions of space exploration—that have unduly influenced Feynman’s current concept.
Why the emphasis on creating a very small, 1 meter cubed package size?? This is a great size for something that we are shipping to the moon on a Saturn V rocket, or landing on Mars via skycrane, or perhaps sending to a distant star system as a Von Neumann probe. But for colonizing Baffin Island or the Sahara Desert or anywhere else on earth, we can use giant containter ships to easily move a much larger amount of stuff. By increasing the minimum size of our self-replicating system, we can include lots of efficiency-boosting nice-to-haves (like different types of alloys, carbide cutting tools, lubricant factories, etc). Feynman imagines initially releasing 1000 one-meter-cubed autofacs (and then supporting them with a continual stream of inputs), but I think we should instead design a single, 1000x-size autofac (it doesn’t have to be one giant structure—rather a network of factories, resource-gathering drones, steel mills, power plants, etc), since that would allow for more efficiency-boosting complexity.
The remaining argument for 1000 one-meter-cubed autofacs is that it would be easier to design this much-smaller, much-simpler product. This is true! I’ll get back to this in a bit.
In general, I suspect that the ideal size of the autofac system should be proportional to the amount of transportation throughput you can support to Baffin Island / Mars / wherever. Design effort aside, it would be ideal to design the largest and most complex possible autofac which would fit into your transportation budget (eg, if you can afford five container ships to Baffin Island per year, then your autofac system should be large enough to fit into five container ships.
Cutting humans entirely out of the loop is very appealing for deep-space exploration, but less appealing for places like Baffin Island. As long as you are only relying on relatively unskilled labor (such that you aren’t worried about running out of humans to import, during the final stages of the industrialization of the island when millions and millions of windmills / steel mills / etc are going up), then importing a bunch of humans to handle a small percentage of high-value, hard-to-automate tasks, is probably worth it (even though it means you now have to provide housing, food, entertainment, law enforcement, etc).
As others have mentioned, this “compromise” vision seems similar to Tesla’s dreams of robotic factory workers (in large, container-ship-sized factories that still employ some human workers) and Spacex’s mars colonization plans (where you still have a few humans assembling a mostly-mechanical system of nuclear power plants and solar panels, habitable spaces, greenhouses for food, etc—but no 1-meter cubes to be seen, since Starship can carry 100 tons at a time to Mars).
But again, I admit that re-complexifying the economy by introducing humans, does greatly increase the design complexity and thus the design effort required at the beginning.
The one-meter-cubed autofac seems so pleasingly universal, like maybe once we’ve designed it, we could deploy it in all kinds of situations! But I think it is a lot less universal than it looks.
A Baffin-Island-Plan autofac wouldn’t fare well in the Sahara desert, where you’d want to manufacture solar panels (which rely more on chemistry and unique materials) instead of simple mechanical windmills that could be built almost entirely from steel. In the sahara, you’d also have less access to iron ore in the form of exposed rock; by contrast you’d have a lot of sillica that you could use to make glass. On the moon, you’d have no atmosphere at all for wind, and extreme temperatures + vacuum conditions would probably break a lot of the machine-shop tools (eg, liquid lubricants would freeze or sublimate). Etc.
The above point isn’t a fatal problem—just having one autofac system for deserts and another for tundra would cover plenty of use cases for industrializing the unused portions of the earth. But you’d also run into problems when you finished replicating and wanted to use all those Baffin Island autofacs to contribute back to the external, human economy. Probably it would be fine to just have the Baffin Island autofacs build wind turbines and export steel + electricity, while the desert autofacs build solar panels and export glass + electricity. But if you decided that you wanted your Baffin Island autofacs to start growing food, or manufacturing textiles, you would have a big problem. The autofacs would in some ways be more flexible than a human manufacturing economy (eg, because they are doing more things “by hand”, thus could switch to producing other types of steel products very quickly), but in other ways they would be much more rigid than a human manufacturing economy (if you want anything not based on steel, it might be pretty difficult for all the autofacs to reconfigure themselves).
Design effort & AI—if AI is good enough to replace machinists, won’t it be good enough to help design an autofac?
This post reminds me of Carl Shulman’s calculations (eg, on his recent 80,000 Hours podcast appearance) about the world economy’s doubling times, and how fast they could possibly get, based on analogies to biological systems.
Feynman says that, after many years, nowadays the dream of the Autofac is finally coming within reach, because AI is now good enough to operate robotics, navigate the world, use tools, and essentially replace the human machinist in a machine shop. This seems pretty likely come true, maybe in a few years.
But creating such a small, self-contained, simplified autofac seems like it is motivated by the desire to minimize the up-front design effort needed. If AI ever gets good enough to become a drop-in remote worker not just for machinsts, but also for engineers/designers, then design effort is no longer such a big obstacle, and many of the conclusions flip.
Consider how a paperclip-maximising superintelligence would colonize baffin island:
The first image that jumps to mind is one of automated factories tesselated across the terrain. I think this is correct insofar as there would be lots of repetition (the basic idea of industrial production is that you can get economies of scale, cheaply churning out many copies of the same product, when you optimize a factory for producing that product). But I don’t think these would be self-replicating factories.
A superintelligent AI could do lots of design work very quickly, and wouldn’t mind handling an extremely complex economy. I would expect the overall complexity of the global economy to go way up, and the minimum size of a self-replicating system to stay very large (ie, nearly the size of the entire planetary economy), and we just end up shipping lots of stuff to Baffin Island.
If we say that the superintelligence has to start “from scratch” on Baffin Island alone, with only a limited budget for imports, then I’d expect it to start with something that looks like the 1-meter-cubed autofac, but then continually scale up in the size and complexity of its creations over time, rather than creating thousands of identical copies of one optimized design.
A superintelligence-run economy might actually feature much less repetition than a human industrial economy, since the AI can juggle constant design changes and iteration and customization for local conditions, rather than needing to standardize things (as humans do to allow interoperability and reduce the costs of communicating between different humans).
Okay, I will try to sum up these scattered thoughts...
I think that the ideal autofac design for a given situation will vary a lot based on factors like:
what resources are locally available (wind vs solar, etc)
how expensive it is to support humans as part of the design, vs going fully automated
how much it costs to ship things to the location (the more you can ship, the bigger and more complex your autofac should be, other things equal)
the ultimate scale you’re aspiring to industrialize, relative to the size of your initial shipments (if you want to generate maximum energy on 1 acre of land using a 100 tons of payload, you should probably just import a 100-ton nuclear reactor and call it a day, rather than waste a bunch of money trying to design a factory to build a factory to build a nuclear reactor. Wheras if you are trying to generate power over the entire surface of Mars with a 100 ton payload, it is much more important to first create a self-replicating industrial base before you eventually turn towards creating lots of power plants.
how much it costs to design a given autofac system
a larger, more complex autofac will cost more to design, but will be more efficient
a more-completely-self-sufficient system (eg, including lubricant factories, or eliminating the need for humans on Baffin Island) will cost more to design, but will save on shipping costs later
if you can use lots of already-existing designs, that will lower design costs (but it will increase complexity elsewhere, since now you have to manufacture all the 10,000 types of fasteners and alloys and etc used by today’s random equipment designs)
advanced AI might be able to help greatly reduce design costs
A fully-automated “autofac” design wins over a more traditional human-led industrialization effort, where the upfront costs of designing the mostly-self-sufficient autofac system manage to pay for themsleves by lowering the recurring costs of importing stuff, paying employees, etc, of a human-led industrialization effort.
Whoever decides to start the cool autofac startup, should probably spend a bunch of time considering these big-picture economic tradeoffs, trying to figure out what environment (baffin island, the sahara desert, the oceans, the moon, Mars, alpha centauri, etc) offers the most upside from an autofac-style approach (Baffin-Island-like tundra might indeed be the best and most practical spot), and what tradeoffs to make in terms of autofac size/complexity, how much and where to incorporate humans into the system, and etc.
I would personally love to get a better sense of where the efficiencies are really coming from, that help an autofac strategy win vs a human-led industrialization strategy. Contrast the autofac plan with a more traditional effort to have workers build roads and a few factories and erect windmills all over Baffin Island to export electricity—where are the autofac wins coming from? The autofac would seem to have some big disadvantages, like that its windmill blades will be made of heavy steel instead of efficient fiberglass. Are the gains mostly from the fact that we’re not paying as many worker salaries? Or is it mostly from the fact that we’re producing all our heavy materials on-site rather than having to ship them in? Or somewhere else?
Wow, I think that comment is as long as my original essay. Lots of good points. Let me take them one by one.
The real motivation for the efficiency-impairing simplifications is none of size, cost or complexity. It is to reduce replication time. We need an Autofac efficient enough that what it produces is higher value than what it consumes. We don’t want to reproduce Soviet industry, much of which processed expensive resources into lousy products worth less than the inputs. Having achieved this minimum, however, the goal is to allow the shortest possible time of replication. This allows for the most rapid production of the millions of tons of machinery needed to produce massive effects.
Consider that the Autofac, 50 kg in a 1 m^3, is modeled on a regular machine shop, with the machinist replaced by a robot. The machine shop is 6250 kg in 125 m^3. I just scale it down by a factor of 5, and thereby reduce the duplication time by a factor of 5. So it duplicates in 5 weeks instead of 25 weeks. Suppose we start the Autofac versus the robot machine shop at the same time. After a year, there are 1000 Autofacs versus 4 machine shops; or in terms of mass, 50,000 kg of Autofac and 25,000 kg of machine shop. After two years, 50,000,000 kg of Autofac versus 100,000 kg of machine shop. After 3 years, it’s even more extreme. At any time, we can turn the Autofacs from making themselves to making what we need, or to making the tools to make what we need. The Autofac wins by orders of magnitude even if it’s teeny and inefficient, because of sheer speed.
That’s why I picked a one meter cube. I would have picked a smaller cube, that reproduced faster, but that would scale various production processes beyond reasonable limits. I didn’t want to venture beyond ordinary machining into weird techniques only watchmakers use.
This is certainly a consideration. Given the phenomenal reproductive capacity of the Autofac, there’s an enormous return to finishing design as quickly as possible and getting something out there.
Let me tell you some personal history. I happened upon the concept of self-reproducing machines as a child or teenager, in an old Scientific American from the fifties. This was in the 1970s. That article suggested building a self-reproducing factory boat, that would extract resources from the sea, and soon fill up the oceans and pile up on beaches. It wasn’t a very serious article. Then I went to MIT, in 1979. Self-reproducing machines were in the air—Eric Drexler was theorizing about mechanical bacteria, and NASA was paying people to think about what eventually became the 1981 lunar factory design study. I thought that sending a self-reproducing factory to the asteroid belt was the obvious right thing, and thought about it, in my baby-engineer fantasy way. But I could tell I was ahead of my time, so I turned my attention to supercomputers and robots and AI and other stuff for a few decades.
A few years ago I picked up the idea of self-reproducing boats again. I imagined a windmill on deck for power, and condensing Seacrete and magnesium from the water for materials. There was a machine shop below decks, building all the parts. But I couldn’t make the energy economy work out, even given the endless gales of the Southern Ocean. So I asked myself, what about just the machine shop part? Then I realized the reproduction time was the overriding consideration. How can I figure out the reproduction time? Well, I could estimate the time to do it with a regular human machine shop, and I remembered Eric Drexler’s scaling laws. And wow, five weeks?! That’s short enough to be a really big deal! So, a certain amount of calculation and spreadsheets later, here we are, the Autofac.
I considered varied environments for situating the Autofac:
a laboratory in Boston. Good for development, but doesn’t allow rapid growth.
a field near a railroad and power line in the Midwest. Good for the resource inputs, but the neighbors might reasonably complain when the steel mill starts belching flame, or the Autofacs pile up sky-high.
Baffin Island. Advantages described above.
Antarctic Icecap. Bigger than Baffin, but useful activities are illegal. Shortage of all elements except carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen.
The Moon. Even bigger. Ironically, shortage of carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen. No wind, so the Autofac has to include solar cell manufacture from the git-go. There will be lots of problems understanding vacuum manufacturing. Obvious first step toward Dyson Sphere.
Carbonaceous asteroids. Obvious second step toward Dyson Sphere.
So, I decided to propose an intermediate environment. Obviously, it was rooted in the mid-20th-century visions of space exploration. But that didn’t set the size, or the use of Baffin Island, or anything else really. We’ll build a Dyson Sphere eventually, but I don’t feel the need to do it personally.
More to come.