Promoting Abundance

The Third System

Think of a programmer working at 2:00 AM to add a feature to an Open Source program he didn't write. The programmer is not paid for this work; he does it because he wants the program to be more usable and more popular; he has been working for six hours without a break. At 2:30 AM he adds his name to the list of contributors, uploads the improved program to a website for free distribution, then spends the next hour reading free articles on-line.

We have said that Guardian principles are best for dealing with zero-sum or negative-sum situations, and Commercial principles are best for dealing with positive-sum situations. The invention of computers has created unlimited-sum situations.

An unlimited-sum situation is one in which the cost of an event is both very low (“too cheap to meter”) and unrelated to the value. Anything that exists in the form of computer data can be copied and distributed at remarkably low cost. And a wide range of things—including music, news, blueprints, books, recipes, and scientific papers—can be represented as computer data.

Of course, some things are valuable only because they are rare, so too much copying would actually reduce their value. But some information becomes more valuable to its creators the more it is copied. Many hobbyists would like their creations to be widely appreciated—as long as the viewer knew who had created it. The authors of scientific papers and the programmers of Open Source software want as many people as possible to use their work—as long as they get appropriate credit. The more such information is copied, the more benefits accrue both to the inventor and to the users.

The Information System has arisen to facilitate the production and copying of freely shared information. This system of action is related to the so-called hacker ethic and to the older system of academic endeavor. You can read more about the "Rise of the Information System" in CRN's paper on "Three Systems of Action."

Tomorrow we will discuss the danger of monstrous moral hybrids.

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Comments

[John B]

1) "Unlimited sum" is at best a misnomer. There are finite limits on how efficient such activities can be made. Factors involved in that limitation include productive time availability that's not necessary for continued existance, number of interested people willing to spend their time and skilled labor on such efforts, both social and network connectivity - hard to work on something if you've never heard of it!, and probably others I'm not bright enough to think up.

2) While any single event may be "too cheap to meter", such as the methane gas emissions from a single cow, when you have a world of cows all producing methane you start getting non-trivial amounts of methane produced, with interesting side effects.

3) "Low cost" is not "no cost."

In short - very optimistic, and very influenced by Open Source concepts which are currently doing well in a highly subsidized environment. It is IMO quite questionable if these concepts would be possible as the primary 'system' (as you're using the terms here), instead of playing second fiddle to the Commerce and (to a degree) Guardian 'systems'.

-John

Semi-offtopic, for the Open Source crowd - I realize this is a rather unpleasant take on OS. Subsidies as I refer to 'em above include the vast number of people (AKA, small percentage of the population) who work a day job, spend their money on internet access & their 'free' time on open source efforts.

Also the 'free' public access to the internet via schools, libraries & the like which are actually funded by taxes, philanthropy, and/or hidden in college admission fees.

Also the 'free' legal & business expertise backing up such efforts as the EFF & GNU, which are similarly supported either by other people's jobs which give them enough free time to donate their skills, money, time, etc, or via philanthropy, or other methods.

[Phillip Huggan]

Don't forget to mention all the people with jobs who are leeching off the "free" societal constructs fabricated by the greatest thinkers who have ever lived :)
The sun should start charging us for energy.

[John B]

Yeah, but who wants to get paid in fusion droppings? *wry grin*

-JB, grinning

[Phillip Huggan]

I agree with you John that low cost is not no cost. If the feedstock price winds up approaching the price of plastics/oil or some other limited commodity, we won't truly see a diamond age until after we use MNT to harvest asteroids or mining Lunar crater breccias.

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

Phillip, remember that performance of nano-built stuff will be vastly higher than plastic. As a rough rule of thumb, things can weigh between 1/100 and 1/1000 as much. (Then you add water ballast.) My car cost about $6/pound. I'd happily pay $50/pound for a 10-pound car.

Besides, I'd expect feedstock to get pretty cheap as soon as someone develops a nanofactory blueprint for feedstock processors.

Chris

[Rxke]

re: feedstock... I always assume somebody will come up with a way to convert atmospheric CO2 to carbon feedstock and O2, sure that'd take a lot of energy, but make it solar-powered and you have the ultimate airscrubber :)

[Phillip Huggan]

My point is that it is tough to guess how quickly global diamond engineering projects will be created without knowing what the specific feedstock is (I've heard a whole alphabet soup of hydrocarbons discussed). If it is tied to oil, I think some oil refining processes require high-melting temperature metal containers, so then diamond machines must be used to scale-up metals mining too...
There may be one or two trillion kgs of oil produced annually at the time MNT is introduced. Maybe everyone gets two hundred kgs of diamond consumer goods annually. It sounds like a lot, but it isn't enough to build some of my prefered projects, including underground (hardened) diamond cities. I don't think it would even be enough to lay down a global grid of diamondoid ground penetrating radar sensors to look for goo bombs or clandestine MNT/WMD bunkers. Some feedstocks are even more rare than oil. Some are obviously more plentiful.

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

Phillip, I'm really not sure hardened bunkers will be good for much. There are too many different types of weapon.

My first reaction on reading your 1-200 kg estimate was, "That's way too low--I put that much in my gas tank every month or two." Then I realized that I'm a privileged American, and yes, that's about right when averaged over the world's population (assuming peak oil hits pretty hard--the back of my envelope says we do 4 tr. kg/yr of oil today). A sobering thought.

Note that heat pollution may limit us to 100 kW/person, or ~10 kg/person of active nanomachinery. (This is based on Freitas's calculations.) Of course, any human-scale product will contain mostly inert mass.

Back to the feedstock question: Yes, to provide hundreds of kg per year to each person would require either a massive industrial effort, or all-new nano-built distributed infrastructure (if possible). This is an area that could benefit from further research.

Chris

[DT]

Couldn't people supposedly convert waste into more feedstock in thier homes? I mean if you guys are thinking that far ahead then a waste to feedstock machine shouldn't be too difficult either.

I don' think you can use atmospheric C02 because that would have devastating enviromental issues, besides C02 is to be vastly reduced in the future with or without "MNT", leaving very little c02 to convert.

[John B]

The problem with waste->feedstock is that the waste is random - feedstock must be utterly pure, or purifiable, and of given atomic composition. Odd chemical (atomic) bits in the mix that're unplanned for and not handled will gum it up right quick.

There's at least ONE possible "brute-force" way around this, and that's to grind everything up to a slurry of atoms and somehow sort them out, probably on diamond crush rollers, but this leaves a lot of other questions unanswered - how do you prevent the chemicals that're physically disassociated from reacting with the diamond or each other? Some - fluorine, sodium, etc - are VERY reactive and quite good at forming bonds, often where you don't want 'em.

Just my 2c,
John

[DT]

If its complicated people couldn't do it at home, because people won't spend time trying to process feedstock even if it takes a short amount of time, however waste management concerns could. But lets say all this is possible, wouldn't it be easier to connect a pipe to peoples homes like we do today with gas pipes if the feedstock is very cheap, certainly people would much rather pay a few pennies rather than build thier own feedstock, 5 cents is certainly worth 5 minutes of anyones time.

Also I like to bring up another thing, in 20 years the world population would be much wealthier, and vast majority of developing countries will be developed, so a enormous number of consumers will be available thats not even imaginable today, when this is the case I believe products will be extremely cheap because demand would be so enormous that the cost per product would be spread around 10-20 folds. So feedstock processing and such would be even cheaper than we think because the demand is so high that rather than 50 cents a pound today would cost 5 cents when the cost is broken down ten folds. You have to think future demand, people who are poor today could very well be middle class by 2020. People are going to be more materialistic in the future, we won't see the Chinese farmer churning butter and working the land anymore, he'll be buying everything and using his time buying the latest digital camera and picnicing, the times where people digged wells for water and couldn't afford to buy rather than build will be long gone, not with MNT, I mean generally with or without MNT the whole world in 15-20 years will look like the west.

[John B]

"5 cents is certainly worth 5 minutes of anyones time" - Perhaps true in the Western world, but one of the potential benefits of nanofac technology which has been suggested by many is the reduction/abolution of poverty. Given that there're quite a few people - at least tens of millions, up to 2 orders of magnitude more depending who you ask - who're living under $300 a year (less'n $1/day!), I would think a cent a minute would most likely be beyond their financial reach, at least initially.

Given as well that the introduction of something like a nanofac is most likely to bring about a HUGE recession as businesses come to grips with the new economic realities (which would be RADICALLY different from what we've known up thru the present), and that population would most likely expand rather quickly.

Quite possibly in the 1st world, too.

As to the world being better 20 years after a nanofactory comes to be, I can think of many many alternative scenarios where it won't necessarily be true. Look up Dr Nick Bostrom's paper on "Existential Risks" - it's available off his homepage, among other places. In short, existential risks are risks which, if they're gotten wrong, are final.

Fer instance: one of Dr Bostrom's example scenarios is the generation of a police state using ubiquitous spy devices to maintain control of the populace. Another is a Grey Goo ('ecophagy') scenario. Both are much more likely with nanotech, than without.

Personally, I find your assertion that "we won't see the Chinese farmer churning butter and working the land anymore, he'll be buying everything and using his time buying the latest digital camera and picnicing" massively optimistic, perhaps bordering on naieve.

1) Early nanofactories aren't going to be universal assemblers. It'll take TIME before all the chemical bonds needed to make food are understood, engineered, and available. (Chris Phoenix has written of a possible way around this with microfluidics, but straight nanotech ain't gonna instantly be there. IMO)

2) The political situation isn't going to change that quickly unless something horrific happens, a la Dr Bostrom's existential risks. People in power hold on to that power very, very tightly. How this'll extend into a world of nanofacs I don't know, but I rather expect it to be a MAJOR hindrance in the wide acceptance of the technology. (That is - they'll use it or its products themselves, but find ways to block it from general use). (As stated elsewhere on this site - I'm a pessimist regarding human nature.)

3) Even if you have a "santa claus machine" instantly available around the world, that chinese farmer isn't going to change their attitudes. S/he is USED to working, USED to chickens, USED to working within their budget and growing season. Some will adopt the new technology - and, given human nature as I see it, some WILL fail. This'll indicate to the more conservative "chinese farmer" (or appalacian miner, or nordic herder, or fill-in-the-blank) that these new-fangled methods ain't worth the risk.

4) See also Mr Huggan's point in this thread that carbon availability isn't going to be very high if spread across all people on the face of the planet. Even if you WANTED to give everyone a diamondoid home, wardrobe, and tools, you're going to have to get VERY clever in how you fuel the nanofactories.

Not saying you can't find sources - all those carbon sinks we keep discovering are available for fodder if need be, from reefs to bogs to sea-floor deposits. It's just that each is going to require its own processing method(s) and several have environmental difficulties.

-JB

[DT]

"4) See also Mr Huggan's point in this thread that carbon availability isn't going to be very high if spread across all people on the face of the planet. Even if you WANTED to give everyone a diamondoid home, wardrobe, and tools, you're going to have to get VERY clever in how you fuel the nanofactories.

Not saying you can't find sources - all those carbon sinks we keep discovering are available for fodder if need be, from reefs to bogs to sea-floor deposits. It's just that each is going to require its own processing method(s) and several have environmental difficulties."

Then that would put us right back where we were, oil company types and nations with rich carbon sources running lucrative monopolies.

[Phillip Huggan]

3 points... made not so clearly after a weekend of beer golf:
1) I never said lithospere resource limits would limit things in the long-run, just that we would need space tethers or ion engines or mature solar sails, to get the carbon to us over 15-20 years after diamond infrastructure.
2) Chris, I think it is easy with MNT to flood orbital pathways and/or get a semi-effective missile defense, to prevent any "super-annihilation technologies (ram jets and anti-matter, high *c* values)" from occuring for a while. Decentralized living quarters and biosensors eliminates designer plagues, so what is left?
3) Um, I forgot the 3rd point, The National is on. I've been told by a field outsider that I need good calculus for doing diamond surface area calculations. That's not true true, is it?

[John B]

DT -

Exactly. Unless/until other sources (carbon sinks, extraterrestrial) come into play, which they COULD, but the current carbon sources are going to fight the concept tooth & claw.

Phillip -

Never said it'd be a stopper, just a slower. Quoting myself, "carbon availability isn't going to be very high if spread across all people on the face of the planet."

I think those're good starting techs, but I'd include quite a few others, such as space elevators, amat-producing solar-powered satellites (for all that they could make great orbital-bombardment production sites as well as power sources), & probably others.

'high *c*' weapons are IMO going to be a very real problem over time, especially given significant power inputs (the aforementioned amat stations, for instance). the /GOOD/ thing about 'em is that they should be quite visible, the bad thing is that we're not looking now and even if we were we'd not have a lot of reaction time available.

And - if this is you after beer golf, I'm yet more impressed. *wry grin*

-JB

[Phillip Huggan]

I don't think heat pollution will be a constraint, post-MNT. Can't waste heat just be channelled to the upper mantle?

[John B]

Phillip -

Methinks we'll find that eventually (and rather sooner than expected, per Murphy) any "dumping" will come back to haunt us. Just like those who thought it was fine dumping stuff in the sea, or the air, or the ground...

-John

[Phillip Huggan]

I wouldn't suggest dumping waste heat into the mantle without understanding the mantle first (which we don't). Could trigger volcanic activity, earthquakes, maybe there are some deep sea subduction effects that would be altered. I would think the amount of waste heat to be dumped is minor compared to the energy in the mantle.

Not building a full compliment of diamondoid products is also a risk too. Diamond products can be used to migitate other risks. Even diamondoid consumer products should keep people happy, and thus more productive. I agree ideally you'd want to move really large-scale diamondoid manufacturing into space or on/in another solar system body.

[Tom Craver]

I don't think carbon is going to be in short supply for most people.

Ignoring the vast amounts of carbon tied up in the oceans and earth, just 1% of Earth's atmospheric CO2 is enough to provide about a ton of carbon per person.

Then, as Chris suggested, use water (or sand or dirt) as cheap filler and mass multiplier, where you want heavy things, or just build things 100x lighter.

Then there's the huge potential for trivial recycling - build most things out of nanoblocks that can be assembled and disassembled with very low energy cost, and you could continuously reshape your personal ton of carbon, greatly multiplying its value.

Use utility fog, and reality becomes as mutable as virtual reality, and perhaps nearly as energy efficient. Why make your ton of carbon into 100 cars, when you can make one car appear and behave like any car that has ever existed or been dreamt of? Why own a dozen homes, when one home can be changed at will to look like any place?

(About the closest imagery to what becomes possible is shown in the movie "What Dreams May Come", that made a credible attempt at portraying heaven (and hell). Worth watching again, with MNT in mind...)

Energy and land area are more likely to be limiting factors - if only because people will naturally tend to hoarde them as a store of wealth (if they can).

[Brian Wang]

DT is right about average Chinese citizen likely being substantially wealthier. From recent McKinsey Quarterly, it projects the Chinese middle class rising rapidly over the next few years. I summarizing it at this link.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2006/06/economic-future-china-middle-class.html

2015
140 million households (50%) out of 280 million at USD10,000-17000/year in purchasing power parity terms

59 million households (21.2%) out of 280 million at USD17000-40000 per year in purchase power parity terms

28 million household (6%) will be at $40,000+/year

========
A lot of the transformative abundance things are not dependent on much mass. They are information, molecular, genetic and cellular modification, services, etc...

========
As for growing food, just boost up current tech. Meat (cow, pig, chicken, fish etc...) factories using stem cells and cheap nutrients could be here in 5-10 years without nanotech. Nanotech could be used to further enhance them. This would go along with plant hydroponics etc...

Just boosting the genetics etc... of regular plants and animals would further the agricultural revolution.

It does not all have to nanotech alone, change can be boosting other capabilities.

[DT]

Using solar power for energy that much would devastate the enviroment, mass production is actually a better idea rather than personal manufacturing, specially regarding feedstock, I don't think even solar energy is the future of energy, more like advance new technologies that mass produce energy very cheaply would be the key, mass production is always a better choice than personal production, imagine if we all generated our own electricity today, how much pollution we would make, every single house having its own generator which runs 24/7 and uses so much gasoline and no one could enforce pollution laws, rather than one plant producing for thousands of homes which is under stricter pollution laws and switchs waste energy to needed areas rather than one home producing great amount of energy waste. Solar energy is clean yes, but it definately will have a devastating effect on the planet by absorbing so much solar energy in so many areas. In the future our atmosphere will/should be free of excess C02 if we're going to live healthy, using co2 as a carbon source is not going to be possible because there will be lack there of. I don't know who I was reading this from, the feedstock has to be of quality, specially for more advance products, impurities could make the product weak, processing isn't going to be easy with any technology.

I'm very sure in the future our personal incomes will grow and cost of goods will be cut by a 5th thanks to more demand and advance technology, people won't spend time producing thier own products when they can buy it cheap and plentiful, some might for fun but not the vast majority, right now we can produce our own ethanol with a few thousand bucks, and use it for free, infact I know how too,its not hard, but people just won't spend time doing it, even when oil prices are 75 dollars a barrel, imagine in the future when "oil" is 8 dollars a barrel, because we just make it in a factory, 100 times cleaner,100 times more efficient and produce 5 times more than today. This is the future imo, making life easier to live and cheaply, imagine the average person in the future is the same as a person today that has 100 million dollars in the bank, he buys everything and can afford whatever he wants without him lifting a finger and enjoying life to the fullest, this will be the future where people could get anything thats reasonable very cheap and enjoy life, not work the "futuristic land" to live.

[DT]

I just found this article by Robert Freitas, I urge everyone to read it, it explains everything in detail and very realistic perdictions. There is a part about dangers of mass use of solar energy which I mentioned above would devastate the environment. He breaks down the realistic costs of a PN, he also makes very good points on why PN has to be restricted. Definately the closest prediction to the realities of MNT I've yet encountered. This is what I was talking about when I said CRN should write a summary, describe MNT in all forms, specially in its economic form clearly in one full page. I think CRN should post this article here.

click below:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0668.html?

[John B]

Phillip - Looked like a suggestion to do just that - dump heat into the mantle w/out understanding it - and thus I responded as I did.

Diamondoid will help with lots of things, but many key elements - food production, power production, heat dissipation, etc - need to be designed and engineered yet. Oh, there's lots of good ideas out there, but AFAIK no one's made a pure-carbon solar panel yet, nor anything close to food production on a pure diamondoid construction basis. (If I'm wrong here, please do correct me!)

Tom - You're right, atmospheric CO2 could produce lots of diamondoid, once you gather it. What would you do with all the O2 freed? How about planetary effects - what would loosing 1% of the planet's CO2 load do environmentally?

For that matter, how *would* you gather it? *curious look*

If you use an additional material like water or sand as a bulk-adder, doesn't that increase the complexity of your construction designs and actual production?

Do you have control codes for utility fog? No? If not, who's working on it and when do they expect useful results?

DT - Methinks you're missing the point. Mass production is more productive in current models of technology, but I do not agree that it's more productive given even single-element nanofactories. While you still need feedstock and power deliveries, those could become community feeds along the lines of current power or water or natural gas utilities. However, you do away with the bulk transport needed to get materials to the mass production center and finished goods from the centers to the stores, then the additional transport costs from the stores to the end-user.

DT goes on to say, "advance new technologies that mass produce energy very cheaply would be the key". What new technologies are you looking at, if not solar power? *curious look*

I agree, if everyone ran a generator 24/7 rather than getting electricity from utility lines, it'd be bloody noisy and polluting. We're not talking about that. We're talking about a nanofactory - something which doesn't pollute except perhaps for heat production. So part of the energy budget may be required for cooling, and 'heat dissipation' may become the new scarcity to base money off of. (Those that debase THIS currency would eventually cook the planet... *wry grin* Talk about a good international reason to combat counterfitting!)

Another question, DT - You seem to think the economy will go on unchanged after nanofactories are massively accessible.

Where will all the manufacturers go, once their jobs are done by nanofactory? There's still millions of people in the US who're phyiscally making things - what happens when they hit the social support net - welfare and the like?

(In more extreme personal-nanofactory type scenarios, stores are also gone. Most transport infrastructure for bulk goods are also gone. And the strain on the support network is much, much worse...)

-John

[Brian Wang]

DT

The Freitas essay is part of the CRN taskforce set of essays.

http://www.crnano.org/CTF-Essays.htm

all essays in the series have been linked from this blog before and from wise-nano.

The Taskforce's work is part of CRN's work.

btw: I am a member of the taskforce.

====
John- Why are you asking about "all diamondoid food production?"

We can scale up industrial production of stem cell generated meat and greenhouses for plants.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71201-0.html?tw=wn_technology_2

We can also used genetic engineering to make supercows etc...

Bottom line being food production could 4 times or more efficient than it is now, which seems good enough.

Bio-food reactors also look like something fairly easy to take into space stations and lunar bases. We can also bio-engineer crops with extremophile genes to grow them on Mars etc...

Also, why do we need all carbon solar cells? If we could make 60%+ efficient quantum dot solar cells on thin film (projecting out a couple of recent solar announcements)

[Mike Treder, CRN]

META:

DT and Brian, your comments contain URLs that are not coded as active links. The process, as I think you know, is quite simple, using hypertext anchor links.

I can switch comments back to automatically make URL's into active links, but then you'll be unable to add your own bold, italic, etc.

If you want to retain the formatting options, please do your fellow readers a favor and code your URLs as active links.