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”.
How long does that intermediate step take? If the machine shop-shop outputs one shop per week, but every 4th (or whatever) output is a mining-robot-shop or a forestry-robot-shop or something else instead, is that sufficient to solve your inputs problem while only slowing down the doubling time by a modest amount?
My best guess is it takes 5ish years to replicate everything in a machine shop minus the things which can’t realistically be made in a machine shop (e.g. electronics, high speed steel stuff, diamond powder, maybe bearings). Much of that time would be spent on repetitive tasks like making screws. Mining and forestry robots would slow down the process more, likely quite a bit more, not so much because they’re difficult
as because they have a lot of parts.
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”.
How long does that intermediate step take? If the machine shop-shop outputs one shop per week, but every 4th (or whatever) output is a mining-robot-shop or a forestry-robot-shop or something else instead, is that sufficient to solve your inputs problem while only slowing down the doubling time by a modest amount?
My best guess is it takes 5ish years to replicate everything in a machine shop minus the things which can’t realistically be made in a machine shop (e.g. electronics, high speed steel stuff, diamond powder, maybe bearings). Much of that time would be spent on repetitive tasks like making screws. Mining and forestry robots would slow down the process more, likely quite a bit more, not so much because they’re difficult as because they have a lot of parts.