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...
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...