Nowadays we use carbide bits, but we used to use steel bits to cut steel. It’s called high speed steel. It differs from regular steel by being a different crystal structure, that is harder (and more brittle). It used to be perfectly common to cut a steel-cutting tool out of steel, then apply heat treatment to induce the harder crystal structure, and use the hardened tool to cut the softer original steel. It’s one of the reasons I specified steel instead of aluminum or brass.
The machine shop can use a tool until it wears down too much, then un-harden it (a different heat treatment), cut it back to have a sharp edge again, and then re-harden. Steel really is amazing stuff.
I’ve looked into machine tool techniques pretty closely, and I believe I can make them with only 2% by weight that’s not steel or lubricant. In a lot of ways, it’s going back to the designs they used a hundred years ago, before they had good plastics or alloys. For example, the only place you HAVE to use plastic is as a flexible wire insulation.
I welcome your suggestions as to inputs I may have overlooked.
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.
How many different alloys are you expecting to have in stock in there?
HSS is apparently pretty finicky to work with. As I understand it most hobbyists content themselves with O1 or A1 or whatever, which wear a lot faster. But it’s true they’ll cut themselves.
There’s probably a reason, above and beyond cost, why the “bodies” of machines tend to be cast iron rather than tool steel. And for the truly staggering number of standardized alloys that are out there in general.
Well, I seem to be talking to someone who knows more about alloys than I do. How many alloys do you think I need? I figure there’s a need for Neodymium Iron Boron, for motor cores, Cast Iron in the form of near-net-shape castings for machine frames, and some kind of hardenable tool steel for everything else. But I’m uncertain about the “everything else”.
I don’t think the “staggering number of standardized alloys” needs to alarm us. There are also a staggering number of standardized fasteners out there, but I think 4 sizes of machine screws will suffice for the Autofac. We don’t need the ultimate in specialized efficiency that all those alloys give us.
Well, I seem to be talking to someone who knows more about alloys than I do.
Maybe. But what I know tends to be very patchy, depending on what rabbit holes I happen to have gone down at various times.
I figure there’s a need for Neodymium Iron Boron, for motor cores,
I hadn’t thought about magnetics at all, or anything exotic. I was just talking about basic steel.
Unless I’m mixed up, NdFeB is for permanent magnets. You might not need any permanent magnets. If you do, I believe also you need a big solenoid, possibly in an oven, to magnetize them. Said solenoid needs a metric butt-ton of current when it’s on, by the way, although it probably doesn’t have to be on for long.
Inductor and electromagnet cores, including for motors, are made out of “electrical steel”, which is typically cut to shape in thin plates, then laminated with some kind of lacquer or something for insulation against eddy currents. You can also use sintered ferrite powders, which come in a bewildering array of formulations, but if you’re just worried about motors, you’d probably only really need one or two.
Those plates are an example of a generalized issue, by the way. I think those plates are probably normally hot die cut in a roll process. In fact, I suspect they’re normally made in a plant that can immediately drop the offcuts, probably still hot to save energy on reheating them, into equipment that rerolls them back into more stock. Or maybe they even roll them out in their final shapes directly from a melt somehow.
You could mill every single plate in a motor core out of sheet stock on a milling machine… but it would take eternity, go through a ton of tooling, and generate a lot of waste (probably in the form of oily swarf mixed in with oily swarf of every other thing you process in the shop).
There are lots of processes like that, where stuff that you could “hand make” with the “mother machines” isn’t made that way in practice, because specialized machines, often colocated with other specialized machines in large specialized plants, are qualitatively more efficient in terms of time, energy, waste, consumables, you name it. Stuff that’s hot is kept hot until it needs to be cool (and often you try to cool it by putting as much as possible of the heat back into an input stream). Steps are colocated to avoid reheats. Waste products are recycled or used for something else, and the plant for “something else” is often also colocated.
It’s really hard to compete with that kind of efficiency. Most of the individual specialized machines are a lot more than a cubic meter, too. You already mentioned that temperature-sensitive processes tend to have optimal sizes, which are often really big.
Can you afford to use 10 times the energy and produce 10 times the waste of “traditional” processes? If not, you may need a lot of specialized equipment, more than you could fit in a reasonable-sized self-replicating module.
Cast Iron in the form of near-net-shape castings for machine frames,
All castings are imported, right?
By the way, you need nichrome or Kanthal or something like that for the heating elements in your furnace. Which isn’t really different from the copper wire you use, but it’s another item.
some kind of hardenable tool steel for everything else.
Here I break down. I suspect, but do not know, that if you only think in terms of making usable parts, you could at least get away only with “mild steel”, “alloy steel”, “tool steel”, and perhaps “spring steel”. Or maybe with only three or even two of those. I could be wrong, though, because there are tons of weird issues when you start to think about the actual stresses a part will experience and the environment it’ll be in.
If you do want to reduce the number of alloys to the absolute minimum, you probably also have to be able to be very sophisticated about your heat treating. I’d be pretty shocked, for instance, if a high-quality bearing ball is actually in the same condition all the way through. You’d want to be able to case-harden things and carburize things and do other stuff I don’t even know about. And, by the way, where are you quenching the stuff?
Even if you can use ingenuity to only absolutely need a relatively small number of alloys, on a similar theme to what I said above, there’s efficiency to worry about. The reason there are so many standard alloys isn’t necessarily that you can’t substitute X for Y, but that X costs three or four or ten times as much as Y for the specific application that Y is optimized for. Costs come from the ingredients, from their purification, from their processing when the alloy is formulated, and from post-processing (how hard is the stuff on your tooling, how much wear and tear does it put on the heating elements in your furnace, how much energy do you use, how much coolant do you go through, etc).
As I describe in my first reply to Jackson Wagner above, I can tolerate some inefficiency, as long as I stay above Soviet-style negative productivity. The goal is minimum reproduction time. Once I’ve scaled up, I can build a rolling mill if needed.
You could mill every single plate in a motor core out of sheet stock on a milling machine...
As you point out, that would be madness. I’ve got a sheet rolling machine listed, so I assume I can take plate and cold-roll it into sheet. Or heat the plate and hot-roll it if need be. The sheets are only a meter long and a few centimeters wide, so the rolling machine fits inside. They function like shingles for building the outside enclosure, and for various machine guards internally, so they don’t have to be big.
where are you quenching the stuff?
I’m quenching in a jar of used lubricant. Or fresh oil, if need be. 6% of the input is oil.
alloys isn’t necessarily that you can’t substitute X for Y, but that X costs three or four or ten times as much as Y for the specific application that Y is optimized for.
I’m a little reluctant to introduce this kind of evidence, but I’ve seen lots of machinist videos where they say “I pulled this out of the scrap bin, not sure what it is, but lets use it for this mandrel” (or whatever). And then it works fine. I am happy to believe that different alloys differ by tens of percent in their characteristics, and that getting the right alloy is an important occupation for real engineers. I just don’t think that many thousands of them all vary by “three or four or ten times.” I think I can get away with six or so.
I agree with jbash that the value of larger, more specialized structures is sufficient to justify the autofac economy being made up of units besides just the autofacs.
That doesn’t seem like a blocker to the general concept. You just need a slightly more complicated plan. With the rate at which AI is progressing these days, it doesn’t seem to me that plan complication is going to be a barrier.
So the real questions that stand out to me are:
What would the seed cost be to get the initial autofac economy to the scale that it’s exports would more than pay for its imports?
Of the various potential specialized facilities, which ones make economic sense at which scales?
What sort of timeframe does it make sense to operate at sub-profitable scale for, while building things which have internal value that outweighs the cost of interest incurred by operating at a loss?
How much more powerful than current AI would the VLM control system need to be for the initial stages?
Would the development pace of AI keep pace with the increasing complexity as the autofac economy ramps up? (my guess is yes)
What things are worth importing versus making do with self-built?
Computer chips, certainly. Cutting lasers? Probably at least some. The initial parts for the first set of autofacs. Specialty metals and alloys. It’s more a question of how much to import, and the costs versus export value.
Nowadays we use carbide bits, but we used to use steel bits to cut steel. It’s called high speed steel. It differs from regular steel by being a different crystal structure, that is harder (and more brittle). It used to be perfectly common to cut a steel-cutting tool out of steel, then apply heat treatment to induce the harder crystal structure, and use the hardened tool to cut the softer original steel. It’s one of the reasons I specified steel instead of aluminum or brass.
The machine shop can use a tool until it wears down too much, then un-harden it (a different heat treatment), cut it back to have a sharp edge again, and then re-harden. Steel really is amazing stuff.
I’ve looked into machine tool techniques pretty closely, and I believe I can make them with only 2% by weight that’s not steel or lubricant. In a lot of ways, it’s going back to the designs they used a hundred years ago, before they had good plastics or alloys. For example, the only place you HAVE to use plastic is as a flexible wire insulation.
I welcome your suggestions as to inputs I may have overlooked.
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.
How many different alloys are you expecting to have in stock in there?
HSS is apparently pretty finicky to work with. As I understand it most hobbyists content themselves with O1 or A1 or whatever, which wear a lot faster. But it’s true they’ll cut themselves.
There’s probably a reason, above and beyond cost, why the “bodies” of machines tend to be cast iron rather than tool steel. And for the truly staggering number of standardized alloys that are out there in general.
Well, I seem to be talking to someone who knows more about alloys than I do. How many alloys do you think I need? I figure there’s a need for Neodymium Iron Boron, for motor cores, Cast Iron in the form of near-net-shape castings for machine frames, and some kind of hardenable tool steel for everything else. But I’m uncertain about the “everything else”.
I don’t think the “staggering number of standardized alloys” needs to alarm us. There are also a staggering number of standardized fasteners out there, but I think 4 sizes of machine screws will suffice for the Autofac. We don’t need the ultimate in specialized efficiency that all those alloys give us.
Maybe. But what I know tends to be very patchy, depending on what rabbit holes I happen to have gone down at various times.
I hadn’t thought about magnetics at all, or anything exotic. I was just talking about basic steel.
Unless I’m mixed up, NdFeB is for permanent magnets. You might not need any permanent magnets. If you do, I believe also you need a big solenoid, possibly in an oven, to magnetize them. Said solenoid needs a metric butt-ton of current when it’s on, by the way, although it probably doesn’t have to be on for long.
Inductor and electromagnet cores, including for motors, are made out of “electrical steel”, which is typically cut to shape in thin plates, then laminated with some kind of lacquer or something for insulation against eddy currents. You can also use sintered ferrite powders, which come in a bewildering array of formulations, but if you’re just worried about motors, you’d probably only really need one or two.
Those plates are an example of a generalized issue, by the way. I think those plates are probably normally hot die cut in a roll process. In fact, I suspect they’re normally made in a plant that can immediately drop the offcuts, probably still hot to save energy on reheating them, into equipment that rerolls them back into more stock. Or maybe they even roll them out in their final shapes directly from a melt somehow.
You could mill every single plate in a motor core out of sheet stock on a milling machine… but it would take eternity, go through a ton of tooling, and generate a lot of waste (probably in the form of oily swarf mixed in with oily swarf of every other thing you process in the shop).
There are lots of processes like that, where stuff that you could “hand make” with the “mother machines” isn’t made that way in practice, because specialized machines, often colocated with other specialized machines in large specialized plants, are qualitatively more efficient in terms of time, energy, waste, consumables, you name it. Stuff that’s hot is kept hot until it needs to be cool (and often you try to cool it by putting as much as possible of the heat back into an input stream). Steps are colocated to avoid reheats. Waste products are recycled or used for something else, and the plant for “something else” is often also colocated.
It’s really hard to compete with that kind of efficiency. Most of the individual specialized machines are a lot more than a cubic meter, too. You already mentioned that temperature-sensitive processes tend to have optimal sizes, which are often really big.
Can you afford to use 10 times the energy and produce 10 times the waste of “traditional” processes? If not, you may need a lot of specialized equipment, more than you could fit in a reasonable-sized self-replicating module.
All castings are imported, right?
By the way, you need nichrome or Kanthal or something like that for the heating elements in your furnace. Which isn’t really different from the copper wire you use, but it’s another item.
Here I break down. I suspect, but do not know, that if you only think in terms of making usable parts, you could at least get away only with “mild steel”, “alloy steel”, “tool steel”, and perhaps “spring steel”. Or maybe with only three or even two of those. I could be wrong, though, because there are tons of weird issues when you start to think about the actual stresses a part will experience and the environment it’ll be in.
If you do want to reduce the number of alloys to the absolute minimum, you probably also have to be able to be very sophisticated about your heat treating. I’d be pretty shocked, for instance, if a high-quality bearing ball is actually in the same condition all the way through. You’d want to be able to case-harden things and carburize things and do other stuff I don’t even know about. And, by the way, where are you quenching the stuff?
Even if you can use ingenuity to only absolutely need a relatively small number of alloys, on a similar theme to what I said above, there’s efficiency to worry about. The reason there are so many standard alloys isn’t necessarily that you can’t substitute X for Y, but that X costs three or four or ten times as much as Y for the specific application that Y is optimized for. Costs come from the ingredients, from their purification, from their processing when the alloy is formulated, and from post-processing (how hard is the stuff on your tooling, how much wear and tear does it put on the heating elements in your furnace, how much energy do you use, how much coolant do you go through, etc).
As I describe in my first reply to Jackson Wagner above, I can tolerate some inefficiency, as long as I stay above Soviet-style negative productivity. The goal is minimum reproduction time. Once I’ve scaled up, I can build a rolling mill if needed.
As you point out, that would be madness. I’ve got a sheet rolling machine listed, so I assume I can take plate and cold-roll it into sheet. Or heat the plate and hot-roll it if need be. The sheets are only a meter long and a few centimeters wide, so the rolling machine fits inside. They function like shingles for building the outside enclosure, and for various machine guards internally, so they don’t have to be big.
I’m quenching in a jar of used lubricant. Or fresh oil, if need be. 6% of the input is oil.
I’m a little reluctant to introduce this kind of evidence, but I’ve seen lots of machinist videos where they say “I pulled this out of the scrap bin, not sure what it is, but lets use it for this mandrel” (or whatever). And then it works fine. I am happy to believe that different alloys differ by tens of percent in their characteristics, and that getting the right alloy is an important occupation for real engineers. I just don’t think that many thousands of them all vary by “three or four or ten times.” I think I can get away with six or so.
I agree with jbash that the value of larger, more specialized structures is sufficient to justify the autofac economy being made up of units besides just the autofacs.
That doesn’t seem like a blocker to the general concept. You just need a slightly more complicated plan. With the rate at which AI is progressing these days, it doesn’t seem to me that plan complication is going to be a barrier.
So the real questions that stand out to me are:
What would the seed cost be to get the initial autofac economy to the scale that it’s exports would more than pay for its imports?
Of the various potential specialized facilities, which ones make economic sense at which scales?
What sort of timeframe does it make sense to operate at sub-profitable scale for, while building things which have internal value that outweighs the cost of interest incurred by operating at a loss?
How much more powerful than current AI would the VLM control system need to be for the initial stages?
Would the development pace of AI keep pace with the increasing complexity as the autofac economy ramps up? (my guess is yes)
What things are worth importing versus making do with self-built?
Computer chips, certainly. Cutting lasers? Probably at least some. The initial parts for the first set of autofacs. Specialty metals and alloys. It’s more a question of how much to import, and the costs versus export value.