The thing Drexler might as well be right about is that it will at some point be possible for a replicator starting from a very small resource base to quickly self-replicate to be larger than the entire rest of industrial civilization, correct?
Anyone who denies this, I just don’t know what to tell you at this point.
A profitable machine shop can generally make most of the components of a machine shop, and humans who know how to work in a machine shop are not in particularly short supply. As such, machine shops could make copies of themselves until they started to be bottlenecked by human labor with the right skills, electronics, or carbide tools (none of which are bottlenecks now). So that’s already most of an existence proof right there.
That said, the machine shop question does raise additional questions about the replicator model. Particularly: machine shops, in practice, mostly don’t spend most labor and materials on making tools for themselves or other machine shops. Instead, they are plugged into the global economy, which can replicate itself from raw materials much faster than a single machine shop in isolation could.
So the core argument that seems to me to be lacking is why we should expect to go straight from “no artificial self-replicator” to “artificial self-replicator which grows much faster than industrial civilization” without an intermediate step of “system which can mostly self-replicate but which needs some processed inputs”.
The thing Drexler might as well be right about is that it will at some point be possible for a replicator starting from a very small resource base to quickly self-replicate to be larger than the entire rest of industrial civilization, correct?
A profitable machine shop can generally make most of the components of a machine shop, and humans who know how to work in a machine shop are not in particularly short supply. As such, machine shops could make copies of themselves until they started to be bottlenecked by human labor with the right skills, electronics, or carbide tools (none of which are bottlenecks now). So that’s already most of an existence proof right there.
That said, the machine shop question does raise additional questions about the replicator model. Particularly: machine shops, in practice, mostly don’t spend most labor and materials on making tools for themselves or other machine shops. Instead, they are plugged into the global economy, which can replicate itself from raw materials much faster than a single machine shop in isolation could.
So the core argument that seems to me to be lacking is why we should expect to go straight from “no artificial self-replicator” to “artificial self-replicator which grows much faster than industrial civilization” without an intermediate step of “system which can mostly self-replicate but which needs some processed inputs”.