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LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION SPECIAL REPORT
LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION SPECIAL REPORT
CORPORATE CORNUCOPIA:
EXAMINING THE SPECIAL IMPLICATIONS OF
COMMERCIAL MNT DEVELOPMENT
By Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member Michael
Vassar.
Print report!
OVERVIEW
The development of Molecular Nanotechnology (MNT) promises to
rapidly lead to cheap superior replacements for a large majority of
durable goods, all existing utilities, a substantial fraction of all
non-durable goods and some services. For this reason and due to the
relatively low expected cost of developing nanofactories
[1], MNT
represents the largest commercial opportunity of all time.
Unfortunately, the very size of the opportunity, combined with its
extreme suddenness, military significance, potential for disruption of
existing institutions, and ease of duplication create certain severe
complications which lead to difficulties in capturing the value
created.
MNT also has the potential to impact the
timeframes and
severities of a number of major global risks such as those of
terrorism, emergent disease, global warming,
omnicidal war, and human
extinction due to competition by either intelligent or unintelligent
robotic competitors, for which reason there are important
non-commercial motivations for preventing its unrestricted utilization.
As a result of these difficulties and of the intrinsic uncertainty
associated with any particular attempt to develop MNT, commercial
development of MNT is likely to be much less rapid than would be
predicted from a simple consideration of the value to be created,
relevant time horizon and risk adjusted discount rate.
Despite this, it remains highly probable that MNT will first be
realized by a commercial project for the simple reason that
probabilistic priors so strongly favor commercial development of new
technologies. A slew of militarily relevant technologies were
developed by the US, German and Russian governments during the Second
World War and in its aftermath, but that was at a time when the
commercial and public sectors were far more fully integrated than they
are today and when the external pressures forcing governmental efficacy
were greater. By contrast, over the last few decades virtually all
significant technological developments have been commercial in origin,
or even recreational as in the case of the open source movement and
SpaceShip One, rather than public. Governmental R&D initiatives,
such
as those aimed at curing cancer and AIDS and at developing space travel
and fusion power have tended to fail totally or almost totally during
the past 30+ years.
SpaceShipOne landing
Given that an important subset of possible scenarios are driven
by commercial development, it seems prudent to examine in some detail
the major features of most commercial scenarios and to identify the
ways in which developers may experience unique difficulties distinct
from those associated with the development of other products and the
ways in which they may manage those difficulties. This paper will
attempt to do that, examining the probable implications of both
relatively open and relatively secretive development programs in the
event of successful development of MNT. It will be assumed that the
developers are highly rational and informed, and that they are
attempting to profit maximize in the relatively short term while
avoiding the most serious risks of MNT development. MNT development
will be assumed to occur within the next 20 years over the backdrop of
a world politically and technologically fairly similar to our own, and
with a historically typical gap of a few years between the initial
development of the technology and its successful imitation or
implementation by competing projects. It will also be assumed that the
more powerful MNT applications, such as those in intelligence
amplification, neuroscience, extremely powerful distributed robotic
systems and AI will take some time to emerge even given nanofactories
and massive funding.
PART 1. COMPETITIVE STRATEGY
A) PRICING
The simplest and most traditional of the problems facing MNT
developers is competitive pricing. Setting the prices of MNT goods
close to the cost of production provides little profit with which to
expand or compensate for risk undertaken, while setting prices too high
threatens both to unnecessarily reduce consumption below the optimal
level and to draw both legal and illegal competitors into the field.
In addition, given the number of industries in which MNT products are
likely to compete and the political clout of many of those industries,
either high or low prices could motivate antitrust concerns.
Theoretically a higher price is indicative of a monopoly while a lower
price indicates competition, but a lower price will also lead to more
successful and rapid competition with existing companies and to greater
market share which could be seen as evidence of monopoly status or of
anticompetitive tactics.
Motivating competitors to develop MNT is probably the most
serious risk associated with high pricing. In order to minimize this
risk it will be necessary for prices to be relatively low, and also for
expenses to appear as great as possible. It is particularly desirable
that the apparent cost of developing MNT be as great as possible, as
this is the expense that can most easily be inflated. One way in which
this can be done is to publicly spend as much money as possible on
research ostensibly aimed at developing nanofactories over a fairly
long period of time after nanofactories have actually
been developed.
Money can soundly be borrowed in order to fund this research, even at
high interest rates, due to the certainty of eventual success.
Meanwhile, profits can be generated via the sale of supposedly
incremental results of the nanofactory research such as gem quality or
better diamonds, doped silicon computers modestly more powerful than
those otherwise available at a given price, and inexpensive carbon
nanotubes.
Once the nanofactories are publicly
acknowledged to exist,
the apparent low hanging fruit associated with the supposed development
trajectory will be depleted, and a substantial fraction of the global
pool of technical experts plausibly capable of relevant work will have
already been recruited, discouraging imitation. In addition, the
creditors will constitute a class of stakeholders in the new technology
who are nonetheless integrated into the existing economic system. Loan
repayment will contribute to the justification of profit to the public
and to the government. In general the public appears to accept the
legitimacy of high profit margins most readily when the product in
question is either an extremely expensive luxury, an extremely
inexpensive everyday item, or a new product with an explicit need to
amortize development costs. It is important to point out that it is
excessive profit margins, not excessive profits which are usually
considered objectionable. For this reason, actual profits will be
greater if expenses can be increased, because the dollar value of a
200% markup is larger on a product costing $100 to produce than on one
costing $10. Wasteful expenditures on supposed inputs can also create
stakeholders.
Like software, restricted versions of MNT products can easily
be designed and can be sold for lower prices than unrestricted
versions. For instance, less expensive copies of a given product can
be sold to less wealthy countries, or even less wealthy regions within
a country. This can be done without competing with the products sold
to wealthier regions by installing GPS or inertial locators which
monitor their location and prevent them from functioning outside of
their licensed area. In this manner, profitability can be maximized by
selling to all potential customers for prices that constitute a
reasonable fraction of their willingness to pay. With built-in
biometric sensors, some MNT devices could even be assigned prices based
on the personal characteristics of their purchaser. In addition to
maximizing profit, this sort of strategy should greatly reduce any
humanitarian concerns regarding the distribution of MNT products. The
public generally accepts the existence of restricted software without
resentment. Nanostructured physical objects can be made more difficult
to hack than either software or contemporary hardware, so the
restrictions on use built into MNT products can be more robust than
those built into today's printers or software.
B) IP PROTECTION
The most likely outcome of patenting nanofactories in any given
country would be widespread patent violation both by other countries
and by most governments, many criminal organizations, etc. This would
probably be followed by the slew of problems
[2]
that have long been
predicted to accompany uncontrolled MNT development, including unstable
arms races,
malicious grey goo, and massively oppressive MNT empowered
governments. In addition, pirate nanofactories would be used to build
nanofactories of unpatented design, which would then be
patented.
This
does not mean that IP law cannot contribute some value to a MNT first
mover. A large number of patents of variable scope can be produced to
restrict what products a competing MNT developer can produce legally.
Patents on key components can obstruct possible commercial efforts to
develop competing nanofactories without revealing overly much about the
workings of existing nanofactories. In a field as large and as
unexplored as nanotechnology there will surely be room for a number of
extremely broad patents which can be used to slow down competitors. In
such a fast moving field even a patent that delays competition by a few
months before being overturned may be extremely valuable. Potential
patents might include mechanochemistry, carbon mechanochemistry,
self-replicating machines, self-replicating programmable productive
systems, diamondoid nanoscale machines, and more, but care should be
chosen
to avoid revealing too much about how a nanofactory can be
built.
Governments may attempt to force developers to share MNT
production capabilities or may simply steal such capabilities. Once
high level officials become able to distinguish between reality and
science fantasy and recognize the technology's potential, they will
rightly see MNT as a national security issue. Preventing simple theft
is relatively easy. Nanofactories can be made large enough that they
can't be stolen covertly and/or lost. They can also be networked
wirelessly or otherwise equipped for easy inventory. It will also add
little complexity to equip all nanofactories with oxidative
self-destruction systems. The best way to resist forceful
interrogation is probably to not have any individuals within the
company who know everything or almost everything that is needed in
order to build a new nanofactory and to hold out the threat of not
doing business with countries that violate the company's
rights.
Directly threatening a country like the United States in this manner
would be unwise. Rather than doing that, an indirect threat could be
delivered by setting up production facilities in some "high political
risk" countries with little respect for private property. If this is
done it is likely that one of these countries will attempt to steal MNT
production capabilities prior to any developed country doing so. If
the company responds by destroying all stolen assets, not sharing
information, and refusing to trade with that country this will deter
other nations from repeating their mistake, at least in the short term.
The desire not to imitate the behavior of disreputable states will be
another incentive for developed countries to respect the rights of the
developing company.
Throughout the early commercialization of MNT, the continual
borrowing of as much money as possible will be a major imperative.
This is true for several reasons. The first of these is that it is
important to retain control of the company and associated technology in
order to implement a relatively long term plan rather than one that
might maximize shareholder profits in the very short term, for which
reason stock should not be sold to raise capital. The second is that
over the first decade or so, the scale of operation associated with the
developing company will be continually increasing at such a rate as to
make even ludicrous debts from a few years back trivial. The third
reason is to acquire the previously mentioned sets of justificatory
expenses and of influential stake holding creditors.
A fourth reason will become relevant later in development, once the
potential of MNT is well established and the broader public and public
intellectuals become hostile. Hostility is a nearly certain early
result of any massive technological disruption regardless of the
quality of life improvements it makes available. (Aging reversal
technologies may turn out to be an exception to this generalization,
since their psychological impact will be unprecedented in scope and are
not easily predicted, but thus far even aging reversal seems to fit
this generalization).
As hostility develops in response
to massive
technological impact, it may be both possible and desirable to slow
governmental activity by reducing governmental access to funds. This
might be accomplished by competing with the government to drive up the
price of debt and by releasing products which make an attractive
lifestyle achievable on the interest payments from a moderate amount of
high yield debt, reducing the size of the workforce and thus
increasing the cost of running a large bureaucracy. Such actions
should be undertaken gradually so that they are not interpreted as an
attack on borrowers and bureaucracies, as that would lead to
escalation. By raising both the interest rate and the wages of skilled
labor, potential competitors can be further prevented from developing
MNT independently.
C) DEALING WITH OPPOSITION
Due to the potential for economic and social disruption, some
countries may refuse to allow the import of MNT derived products. This
is not a serious problem for a MNT producer. A general boycott by all
major nations is extremely unlikely, especially considering the
magnitude of the benefits that MNT would make available. Tariffs would
take some time to put into effect and whatever nation stood to improve
its trade balance via MNT exports would petition the WTO for tariff
elimination. In addition, MNT can be used to produce traditional
capital for the production of non-MNT products.
One of the earliest products released by a MNT developer is
likely to be inexpensive hydrocarbons for fuel and other applications.
These can be made by harvesting solar energy over the oceans, using it
to hydrolyze water, and using the hydrogen to reduce atmospheric or
other CO2. The machinery for all of this can be produced
in any quantity rather quickly using MNT. Floating solar platforms can
be made with either hydrocarbon production or MNT manufacturing
capabilities. The manufacturing centers should be designed to utilize
the hydrocarbons as feedstock and solar energy as a power source in
order to rapidly produce more platforms of both types. Design and
control for such platforms should be non-problematic, and their
products could be sold on the global petrochemicals and natural gas
market.
There would be no practical difference between a
country that chooses to purchase Saudi oil and one that purchases MNT
derived oil, as both would apply demand to the same pool of global
production impacting the same global price, making boycotts ineffective
unless they were extremely broad. Hydrocarbon storage facilities will
probably have to conform to all normal laws regarding the storage and
transport of hydrocarbons, complicating implementation somewhat.
However, simply violating regulations and hiring legal teams to delay
the imposition of fines until they are no longer relevant may be an
acceptable strategy for faster implementation if the regulatory
framework would otherwise slow development overly much.
While MNT will accelerate the development of new products, it will
reduce the time required to build new capital far more. As a result,
production capabilities sufficient to satisfy global petrochemical
demand should take much less time to develop than designs capable of
competing in a wide variety of industries. The revenue generated via
the initial products will be an important part of what enables the
rapid development of newer products.
The revenue from this early activity will be more than sufficient to
hire as many researchers and administrators as can be productively
utilized to develop new MNT designs. Integrating so many new employees
without critical security risks will be a difficult problem, but it
should be a manageable one as there are already many companies that
face similar difficulties. At this point the MNT developers should
also have enough money to purchase both public opinion and political
influence in so far as these goods can be rapidly purchased. Hopefully
a large fraction of the environmentally aware can be made to see MNT
derived carbon neutral hydrocarbons as the solution to Earth's most
pressing problem, but in fact it will require both massive spending and
capable marketing to avoid being criticized for some failing or another
instead.
In order to minimize opposition it will be critically important for the
developers not to be seen as a non-competitive monolith. This will be
particularly difficult if MNT development is overt as opposed to
remaining a secret, but it is probably possible under either secret or
public development. The company may be most able to avoid conveying
the impression of monopoly if it carefully and legally shares its
technology with a few select partners who thoroughly appreciate the
dangers associated with MNT (especially the critical dangers of
uncontrolled AI and unstable arms races), the need to avoid them, and
the consequent need to avoid further disseminating the basic
technology.
If these partners compete in the production
and sale of
relatively safe MNT products it is possible that the market will be
generally seen as saturated and further entrants will be discouraged.
This decision would constitute a non-secretive alternative to the
earlier prospect of inflating the apparent cost and difficulty of MNT
development, although both strategies could be pursued sequentially.
In the case of such a strategy, as in contemporary oligopoly
arrangements, branding will become an extremely important part of
profit maximization. A more trusted brand will probably be able to
charge a substantial premium, especially for nanomedical products and
services once those develop.
D) FIRST MOVER ADVANTAGES
With MNT technology, you want your team to be
first.
A large fraction of the profitability associated with nanomedicine, and
to a lesser degree that associated with any new MNT product, is likely
to occur during the period of initial release. This is true because
MNT products will often solve problems cleanly and completely, leaving
no significant vestigial market. For instance, one of the first novel
nanomedical devices produced using MNT is likely to be a powder of
biocompatible glucose oxygen fuel cells with internal temperature
sensors to avoid excess waste heat and a binding site for later removal
from the bloodstream.
The purpose of this device would
be simply to
burn fuel, producing waste heat. From the public's perspective it will
be a rapid weight loss infusion capable of safely producing 1-2 lbs of
weight loss per day or several times that in extremely cold weather or
while the body is immersed in cool water. Once this system is safely
developed and successfully marketed, the market will be gone. People
may continue to become overweight, but the world's accumulated pool of
overweight people willing to use nanomedicine will be expended. Those
overweight people who are reluctant to use new medical technologies
will surely still prefer, when they eventually decide to use one, to
use the established brand even if it costs somewhat more than its
competition, as its safety will have been more thoroughly established.
Furthermore, later nanomedical devices will incorporate the weight loss
function as a mere side effect of their other capabilities, making this
design obsolete.
In other fields the advantages from
safety, branding,
superior R&D, and expansion into a technological frontier will not so
completely favor the first mover, but it is a basic economic result
that all else being equal, oligopoly quantity competition leaves first
movers with dominant market share even in the long run
[3].
Note: In price competition, producers compete to sell for the lowest
possible price. They choose what price they will sell at and then sell
as many as the public demands at that price. In practice, this
requires that the company be able to match supply precisely to demand.
Economically this is equivalent to perfect competition and eliminates
all profit. In quantity competition producers sell undifferentiated
products to wholesalers, setting the quantity sold to maximize profits.
As the number of competitors increases this becomes more like perfect
competition because each producer has increasingly little incentive to
restrict quantity in order to maintain demand. By committing to a
particular level of production in advance, earlier entrants can
establish equilibria where they sell larger volumes than later
entrants. With a linear demand curve, each entrant will sell half the
volume of its predecessor. In monopolistic competition, companies sell
similar but branded goods and use marketing and reputation to maintain
a willingness to pay a premium over the market price for branded
products. Branded goods are imperfect substitutes with high cross
elasticities of demand, so as the price of one brand increases
consumers gradually switch over to its competition.
The above result begs a question of course. Are competing MNT
producers likely to engage in the alternation of de-facto collusion and
quantity or monopolistic competition typical of contemporary
oligopolies? The simple answer is yes, at least in the short term, as
this behavior maximizes short run profits for all competitors under the
constraints imposed by antitrust law and prisoner's
dilemmas.
However,
MNT will be associated with novel productive powers which may call the
default assumption into doubt. For instance, the software metaphor of
unlimited manufacturing capacity matching production precisely to
demand, the traditional MNT vision of home manufacturing, and even the
growing paradigm of online agent-based purchasing all suggest price
competition as a plausible alternative.
However, there
seem to be few
large examples of actual price competition in the world of retail, even
where they would be most expected, such as in the sale of bottled
water, public domain IP, internet retailing, and the like. Even
freelance service work such as housekeeping, therapy, tutoring, and
most other examples of work by the self employed are far from perfectly
competitive, with agencies matching consumers to producers and keeping
large commissions and with many producers spending more time searching
for clients than working and demanding far more for an hour of work
than the value of an hour of their time.
By reducing the scale of manufacture, in addition to improving the
ability to match supply to demand, MNT and nanoblock
[4]
assembly seem
likely to produce a world where retail is relatively more important and
wholesale less.
Wal-Mart or its successor may still
sell MNT
products, but if they do they will probably sell them primarily from
large factory/grocery stores rather than from giant wholesale stores,
as the combination of a nanofactory and VR environments for trying out
products will greatly reduce the necessary floor space and inventory
space.
It is also reasonable to suggest that a much
wealthier society
will have fewer incentives either to travel substantial distances in
order to shop or to accept uninteresting work for $10/hr. Smaller
stores which sell an atmosphere and knowledgeable service will thus
have both more customers and less difficulty finding employees. As a
result, brands will be easily differentiated and price competition will
be even less prevalent than it is today.
The sale of energy will provide the first MNT mover with yet another
advantage over later competitors. If claims can be clearly established
to solar energy streams sufficient to satisfy global energy demand and
environmental laws can be passed to restrict the utilization of solar
energy streams other than those initially tapped, competitors may have
to pay a larger amount for solar energy inputs than first
movers.
At this point it is still far from clear whether the developers
of MNT will or should choose to publicize their achievement. To a
substantial degree their decision will probably be driven by the nature
of the company that makes the final enabling innovations, and to a
substantial degree by the intensity of the technological competition.
If MNT is developed in a world where it is generally considered a
retro-futurist fantasy, competition will be much less intense than in
one where it is developed as the result of intense international
competition. I personally expect a scenario reminiscent of that
accompanying the birth pangs of the airplane, i.e. many competitors all
over the world but no very large and competent concerted efforts aiming
at a technology that was still taken by consensus to be impossible
despite a technological infrastructure that was making its achievement
noticeably less difficult every year.
In such a
scenario, a private
company that wishes to utilize MNT productive capabilities will be able
to do so rather overtly without creating widespread awareness of what
is happening. Inexpensive solar panels are surely within the range of
what they can publicly produce, but rapidly deployed macro scale
floating solar oil factories are not.
In a world where
MNT is seen as
completely discredited, or one where ubiquitous but mundane
"nanotechnology" had made Drexlerian predictions seem as quaint as
those once made about nuclear energy or space travel, even the solar
oil factories might not lead to widespread correct conclusions without
an accurate explanation; conversely, if MNT was the 21st century's
space race, there would be little point in secrecy and every reason to
develop and market all important applications possible applications as
quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, it is very hard to imagine a world where the near future
replacement of industrial by molecular manufacturing was taken for
granted by everyone even moderately future oriented in the same way
that today all future oriented people see the digital replacement of
analogue film-making, Chinese dominance of durable goods manufacture,
or the transition to HDTV as inevitable.
The economic
and political
havoc that would be expected to result from a very widespread belief in
truly radically near future change is difficult to calculate, and might
even be sufficient to make such a prophesy self-preventing. For this
reason among others it is fair to say that even weeks after the
development of MNT is announced, the majority of investors will still
not know about it and most of those who do will understand it even less
well than today's typical science fiction author, and will thus not
base any well informed investment decisions on their knowledge of
it.
It is also very likely that such a world would be filled with constant
inaccurate claims of MNT breakthroughs, so accurate information would
not trigger immediate market adjustments upon its
release.
PART 2. MNT RISK MANAGEMENT
A) ECONOMIC DISRUPTION
US EMPLOYMENT SUMMARY
Red indicates >50% of jobs eliminated within 1 year
Yellow indicates >50% of jobs eliminated within 3 years
Blue indicates > 50% of jobs eliminated within 5 years
|
|
|
NAICS | Industry | Employees | Wages |
|
| 11 | Forestry, Fishing, Hunting, and Agricultural
Supply | 183,565 | 4,682,533,000 |
|
| 21 | Mining | 456,128 | 22,091,246,000 |
|
| 22 | Utilities | 655,230 | 40,650,836,000 |
|
| 23 | Construction | 6,582,800 | 239,910,149,000 |
|
| 31-33 | Manufacturing | 16,473,994 | 649,953,798,000 |
|
| 42 | Wholesale
Trade | 6,112,029 | 279,122,206,000 |
|
| 44-45 | Retail
Trade | 14,840,731 | 302,552,506,000 |
|
| 48-49 | Transportation &
Warehousing | 3,790,002 | 125,592,421,000 |
|
| 51 | Information | 3,545,731 | 209,393,800,000 |
|
| 52 | Finance &
Insurance | 5,963,426 | 346,805,452,000 |
|
| 53 | Real Estate & Rental &
Leasing | 1,942,046 | 59,212,092,000 |
|
| 54 | Professional, Scientific
& Technical
Services | 6,816,216 | 362,008,229,000 |
|
| 55 | Management of Companies
& Enterprises | 2,873,521 | 211,361,063,000 |
|
| 56 | Admin, Support, Waste
Mgt, Remediation
Services | 9,138,100 | 210,281,063,000 |
|
| 61 | Educational
Services | 2,532,324 | 61,923,347,000 |
|
| 71 | Arts, Entertainment &
Recreation | 1,741,497 | 43,203,906,000 |
|
| 72 | Accommodation & Food
Services | 9,880,923 | 125,581,836,000 |
|
| 81 | Other Services (Except
Public
Administration) | 5,293,399 | 109,876,770,000 |
|
| Total | 114,064,976 | 3,879,430,052,000 |
|
Much has been made of the large number of jobs which will
become unnecessary with the advent of molecular manufacturing. If all
or nearly all jobs were to rapidly become unnecessary the resulting
economic disruption would not necessarily cause major hardship as some
have feared.
However, a glance at the above table should
provide an
important
reminder that most work is not associated with the production of
products that can be easily replaced by MNT. Instead, early MNT
products will almost replace certain sectors, such as manufacturing;
will greatly reduce the need for workers in some others, such as
mining, utilities, construction, and transportation/warehousing of
goods; will have little direct impact on the demand for work in some
fields, such as educational services, management, and food services;
and will greatly increase the demand for a few professions, especially
IT and possibly scientific & technical services.
Theoretically,
capital can be substituted for most varieties of labor, and MNT will
also greatly expand the ease of creation of capital while devaluing
existing capital), but it will take time for new capital to replace
most workers. For instance, in the short term, trash collecting robots
are unlikely, but in the long term home recycling and incineration
units are likely.
It appears to me that MNT will make
10% - 20% of all
current US jobs obsolete within a year of development, 20% - 40% within
2 years, and in the absence of strong AI will make 60% - 80% of current
work unnecessary within a decade of development as more powerful
tools multiply the capabilities of service workers in fields like waste
management and accommodations/food services.
It probably
needs to be
mentioned that many workers will probably be retained by their
employers for months or years after their services are no longer
necessary due either to contractual stipulations or simply slow
managerial reaction times, and that laws may be passed further
restricting the elimination of jobs. Ultimately obsolete
industries
will disappear even with government life support and will eliminate
jobs by closing if they can't do so with layoffs.
At the same time as many jobs disappear, so will many workers. Great
uncertainty, high discount rates, high interest rates, and novel low
cost lifestyle options will provide many workers with large incentives
to leave their jobs and either retire or try to found new businesses
more suited to the new economy.
This will drive the
expenses faced by
many employers upwards, as noted earlier, but will do little to
mitigate the problem of unemployment, as the workers who have the
capital to invest and retire are by definition not those most
threatened by the loss of their jobs and typically cannot be easily
replaced by even larger numbers of inappropriately trained
workers.
Most of the neediest workers will be covered by state unemployment
insurance, which will have the added benefit of increasing
non-discretionary governmental spending. Increases in the duration of
unemployment payouts should be lobbied for, but even if these are
successful, more will be needed. Further subsidies for the unemployed
may be possible through investments in companies such as
MyRichUncle.com, which give loans in exchange to a fraction of the
borrower's future earnings.
However, several million
people will still
be in need of both money to live on and meaningful work that they are
not able to find for themselves. Dealing with those people is not a
core business function, but providing low cost goods to any agencies
that show competence in doing so (possibly the LDS church or other
religious organizations, groups such as Habitat for Humanity, etc) will
probably be a very sound investment in good will.
By
contrast,
although it would be possible to support all of the displaced people or
hire them for make-work, spending money directly to do so would
generally be expected to aggravate the resentment that was supposed to
be mitigated. One of the most important things to do when mitigating
resentment is to work hard to fight the impression that people with MNT
can do anything and that all remaining problems are therefore their
fault.
For PR purposes it is probably best to downplay
what the
technology is capable of. This will also tend to reduce governmental
fear, public paranoia, and pressure to share dangerous technologies
with militaries that cannot be trusted with them.
B) ABUSE OF NOVEL CAPABILITIES
The second major class of risk that must be avoided is that associated
with intentional abuse. This includes everything from the production
of self-replicating robots to rapid military buildups to universal
intrusive surveillance (even, potentially surveillance of brain
activity, hence of thoughts).
The extreme number of
potentially
disastrous abuses that MNT lends itself to is a very strong argument
for making every possible effort to either maintain secrecy regarding
MNT techniques, or at least to limiting access to extremely trustworthy
parties. Many other documents will discuss the consequences of
failing to maintain secrecy, but for the purposes of this document it
should suffice to assert that so long as MNT remains tightly controlled
these risks should be manageable.
C) DANGEROUS CONSEQUENCES OF EXCESSIVE COMPUTING POWER
The final and most critical danger associated with MNT is that
it will lead to the release of massive computing power and neurological
knowledge which will make it easier to develop AI than to control it,
leading to a total loss of control and human extinction.
It is
obviously best to respond to this by being extremely judicious with
respect to the distribution of devices for studying the brain and by
limiting the available computing power available for a dollar to a
level significantly greater than that being produced by competing
companies but far less than that which could be made
available.
It is
best if the gap between available MNT computers and traditional
computers is great enough to dominate the market and end incremental
development of computing power, but small enough not to contribute
substantially to reducing the cost of parallel projects aimed at
developing MNT or AI. Despite such precautions, MNT development will
accelerate AI development in many ways. The most significant of these
may be the increased ability to spend time on long-term personal
projects resulting from increased personal freedom.
The largest risks are likely to be of an internal origin, as some of
the thousands of researchers in the company may attempt to evolve an AI
on internal nanocomputers. An obvious way to ameliorate this problem
is to only design and produce low power computers and dedicated
computers for running molecular simulations and designing products, or
for other very specific purposes. In the long run
though, this is a
stop-gap measure. Some strategy must be developed for ensuring that
mankind is not accidentally wiped out by an AI.
The
scope of this
problem goes beyond that of this paper, but it is probably a good
starting place to assert that it is probably desirable to do whatever
is possible to direct global R&D towards the development of technology
for making people more intelligent and away from technology for making
machines more intelligent.
Ultimately, it does appear
that AI can be
developed safely and that once this has been done, preventing unsafe AI
permanently should be possible, but it also appears that the level of
intelligence required to safely develop AI is approximately independent
of the available level of computing power while that required to
unsafely develop AI decreases with computing power.
For
this reason,
increasing intelligence and reducing available computing power both
contribute to risk reduction. Anti-aging technology may also
contribute, because it provides a de facto increase in the amount of
thought that a person can ultimately apply to any given problem. But
the development of anti-aging technology would obviously be strongly
commercially and PR driven in any event, and thus requires no further
justification.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1.
Chris Phoenix,
Molecular Manufacturing: What, Why and How.
2.
CRN, Dangers of Molecular
Manufacturing.
3. In price competition, producers compete to sell for
the lowest
possible price. They choose what price they will sell at and then sell
as many as the public demands at that price. In practice, this requires
that the company be able to match supply precisely to demand.
Economically this is equivalent to perfect competition and eliminates
all profit.
In quantity competition, producers sell
undifferentiated
products to wholesalers, setting the quantity sold to maximize profits.
As the number of competitors increases, this becomes more like perfect
competition because each producer has increasingly little incentive to
restrict quantity in order to maintain demand. By committing to a
particular level of production in advance, earlier entrants can
establish equilibria where they sell larger volumes than later
entrants. With a linear demand curve, each entrant will sell half the
volume of its predecessor.
In monopolistic competition,
companies sell
similar but branded goods and use marketing and reputation to maintain
a willingness to pay a premium over the market price for branded
products. Branded goods are imperfect substitutes with high cross
elasticities of demand, so as the price of one brand increases,
consumers gradually switch over to its competition.
4. For an explanation of nanoblock manufacturing, see
Safe Utilization
of Advanced Nanotechnology by
Chris Phoenix and
Mike Treder.
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