So...the entire industrial economy is basically an autofac. What you’re trying to do is simplify it, replacing eg plastics with more steel. But you seem to be expecting that to reduce costs, and the reason people use eg injection-molded plastics instead of steel enclosures is because it’s cheaper. Using carbide bits instead of “high-speed steel” (which requires uncommon metals, btw) is worthwhile, and by replacing things with alternatives that smart specialists have decided are not as good, you’re reducing the overall “replication factor/capability” and input-output efficiency relative to “the entire current industrial economy” as a competing design. The same goes for occasional human intervention for eg maintenance and lubrication—people have decided it’s more efficient overall, despite humans being expensive. It doesn’t make sense to take a design (for an entire economy, or anything else), add a bunch of arbitrary restrictions and simplifications, and expect it to be better in a way that reduces the costs of its products.
The simple autofac plan does oversimplify things in my perspective. I think there is sufficient value in specialization that only some of the autofac economy will be the autofac as described.
Obviously, there would need to be a lot of scaling before it would make sense to internally produce computer chips.
Other specialized robots and subunits do make sense. For example:
Automated diggers to collect the iron ore, and excavate sheltered underground spaces for the autofacs to operate in.
Hydrocarbon facilities which take in seawater, rock dust, waste ash from previous algae batches, and electricity, and use this to power lights and robots to grow algae. Then the algae can be processed into hydrocarbon feedstock for plastics, lubricants, and rust-resistant coatings.
Cranes for assembling wind turbines.
Mentioned elsewhere in the comments, large iron smelter facilities.
General weather-resistant maintenance bots, basically tractors robot arms and flatbed trailers that they tow for transport. They would install and maintain the powerlines and such.
Flywheels for maintaining stability of the primarily wind-based power grid.
Etc...
This still allows for the bulk of the autofac economy to be made up of autofacs that spend a fraction of their capacity producing/repairing/recycling these more specialized forms.
1950s era computers likely couldn’t handle the complex AI tasks imagined here (doing image recognition; navigating rough Baffin Island terrain, finishing parts with hand tools, etc) without taking up much more than 1 meter cubed.
idk, you still have to fit video cameras and complex robotic arms and wifi equipment into that 1m^3 box, even if you are doing all the AI inference somewhere else! I have a much longer comment replying to the top-level post, where I try to analyze the concept of an autofac and what an optimized autofac design would really look like. Imagining a 100% self-contained design is a pretty cool intellectual exercise, but it’s hard to imagine a situation where it doesn’t make sense to import the most complex components from somewhere else (at least initially, until you can make computers that don’t take up 90% of your manufacturing output).
Feynman is imagining lots of components being made with “hand tools”, in order to cut down on the amount of specialized machinery we need. So you’d want sophisticated manipulators to use the tools, move the components, clean up bits of waste, etc. Plus of course for gathering raw resources and navigating Canadian tundra. And you’d need video cameras for the system to look at what it’s doing (otherwise you’d only have feed-forward controls in many situations, which would probably cause lots of cascading errors).
I don’t know how big a rasberry pi would be if it had to be hand-assembled from transistors big enough to pick up individually. So maybe it’s doable!
I was actually thinking of a pair of humanlike arms with many degrees of freedom, and one or more cameras looking at things. You can have dozens of single datum sensors, or one camera. It’s much cheaper. Similarly, once you have some robot arms, there’s no gain in including many single use motors. For example, when I include an arbor press, I don’t mean a motorized press. I mean a big lever that you grab with the robot arm and pull down, to press in a shaft or shape a screw head.
There are two CNC machine tools, to automate some part shaping while the robot does something else.
Mere scaling? Scaling is doing a lot here. Like, an economy the size of the UK’s or something. I do agree that this would require its own set of chip-fab specialized autofacs.
Related: I enjoyed Breaking Tap’s recent video on working towards DIY chip fab. https://youtu.be/RuVS7MsQk4Y?si=EwQt9e_7BB-KVKAy
I see, I suppose I interpreted ‘scaling’ a bit less generally. In that case I agree.
Also I just noticed you mentioned flywheels, which are one of my favorite pieces of technology. I long for someone to make a phone with a flywheel battery as a meme/gag gift.
You could go some way with 1980s-level integrated circuits for all the onboard electronics. The manufacturing requirements are much more tolerable. But even 1980s semiconductors require a couple of dozen chemically exotic and ultra pure feedstocks. The Autofacs would have to build a complex chemical industry before they could start building chips.
So...the entire industrial economy is basically an autofac. What you’re trying to do is simplify it, replacing eg plastics with more steel. But you seem to be expecting that to reduce costs, and the reason people use eg injection-molded plastics instead of steel enclosures is because it’s cheaper. Using carbide bits instead of “high-speed steel” (which requires uncommon metals, btw) is worthwhile, and by replacing things with alternatives that smart specialists have decided are not as good, you’re reducing the overall “replication factor/capability” and input-output efficiency relative to “the entire current industrial economy” as a competing design. The same goes for occasional human intervention for eg maintenance and lubrication—people have decided it’s more efficient overall, despite humans being expensive. It doesn’t make sense to take a design (for an entire economy, or anything else), add a bunch of arbitrary restrictions and simplifications, and expect it to be better in a way that reduces the costs of its products.
The simple autofac plan does oversimplify things in my perspective. I think there is sufficient value in specialization that only some of the autofac economy will be the autofac as described.
Obviously, there would need to be a lot of scaling before it would make sense to internally produce computer chips.
Other specialized robots and subunits do make sense. For example:
Automated diggers to collect the iron ore, and excavate sheltered underground spaces for the autofacs to operate in.
Hydrocarbon facilities which take in seawater, rock dust, waste ash from previous algae batches, and electricity, and use this to power lights and robots to grow algae. Then the algae can be processed into hydrocarbon feedstock for plastics, lubricants, and rust-resistant coatings.
Cranes for assembling wind turbines.
Mentioned elsewhere in the comments, large iron smelter facilities.
General weather-resistant maintenance bots, basically tractors robot arms and flatbed trailers that they tow for transport. They would install and maintain the powerlines and such.
Flywheels for maintaining stability of the primarily wind-based power grid.
Etc...
This still allows for the bulk of the autofac economy to be made up of autofacs that spend a fraction of their capacity producing/repairing/recycling these more specialized forms.
More than mere scaling, this would require equipment orders of magnitude more precise and the necessary ultra-clean environment and all the minutiae those entail. Microchip manufacturing is Hard.
.
1950s era computers likely couldn’t handle the complex AI tasks imagined here (doing image recognition; navigating rough Baffin Island terrain, finishing parts with hand tools, etc) without taking up much more than 1 meter cubed.
.
idk, you still have to fit video cameras and complex robotic arms and wifi equipment into that 1m^3 box, even if you are doing all the AI inference somewhere else! I have a much longer comment replying to the top-level post, where I try to analyze the concept of an autofac and what an optimized autofac design would really look like. Imagining a 100% self-contained design is a pretty cool intellectual exercise, but it’s hard to imagine a situation where it doesn’t make sense to import the most complex components from somewhere else (at least initially, until you can make computers that don’t take up 90% of your manufacturing output).
.
Feynman is imagining lots of components being made with “hand tools”, in order to cut down on the amount of specialized machinery we need. So you’d want sophisticated manipulators to use the tools, move the components, clean up bits of waste, etc. Plus of course for gathering raw resources and navigating Canadian tundra. And you’d need video cameras for the system to look at what it’s doing (otherwise you’d only have feed-forward controls in many situations, which would probably cause lots of cascading errors).
I don’t know how big a rasberry pi would be if it had to be hand-assembled from transistors big enough to pick up individually. So maybe it’s doable!
.
I was actually thinking of a pair of humanlike arms with many degrees of freedom, and one or more cameras looking at things. You can have dozens of single datum sensors, or one camera. It’s much cheaper. Similarly, once you have some robot arms, there’s no gain in including many single use motors. For example, when I include an arbor press, I don’t mean a motorized press. I mean a big lever that you grab with the robot arm and pull down, to press in a shaft or shape a screw head.
There are two CNC machine tools, to automate some part shaping while the robot does something else.
Mere scaling? Scaling is doing a lot here. Like, an economy the size of the UK’s or something. I do agree that this would require its own set of chip-fab specialized autofacs. Related: I enjoyed Breaking Tap’s recent video on working towards DIY chip fab. https://youtu.be/RuVS7MsQk4Y?si=EwQt9e_7BB-KVKAy
I see, I suppose I interpreted ‘scaling’ a bit less generally. In that case I agree.
Also I just noticed you mentioned flywheels, which are one of my favorite pieces of technology. I long for someone to make a phone with a flywheel battery as a meme/gag gift.
You could go some way with 1980s-level integrated circuits for all the onboard electronics. The manufacturing requirements are much more tolerable. But even 1980s semiconductors require a couple of dozen chemically exotic and ultra pure feedstocks. The Autofacs would have to build a complex chemical industry before they could start building chips.