Khannea Suntzu writes to us with a comment about the economic implications of molecular manufacturing (ellipses are in original):
Nanotechnology is disastrous ! But what you are saying, there is no way to stop it ... But ....on the one hand it will cancel jobs on a fundamental scale, and nanotech nor society at large can't possibly create replacement jobs fast enough to keep people with some kind of humane income - ... and on the other hand people with knowledge, infrastructure and wealth will be a lot more capable of expanding their wealth.
Those who are poor will have a delay in catching up while those who are rich will get exponentially richer. So maybe in Europe we'll be able to cope, by implementing some kind of "basic income" and a sane level of taxing the ultra-rich- but I won't see that happen in the ideologically far right-capitalist US or the anarchic third world - so imagine a third world country somewhere in the year 2035, most home industries wiped into oblivion by nanotech minifacs, traditional agriculture wiped into oblivion by cheap biogenetics and superefficient nanotech based agriculture - those people would be without any product in demand, locked away from resources and raw materials, largely incapable of coping because of traditionalist lifestyles and largely incapable of catching up (and I don't even want to think about fundamentalists of one kind or another, who'll reject this concept alltogether!) ...
Am I right in assuming this will (and must) imply the effective end of capitalism as we know it? I.e. we need to start giving stuff away for free?
If we don't most people who are "locked out" will evolve into some form of criminal, right? I mean, try selling this conclusion to US republikans or neoconservatives !!!
These are the kinds of questions we wrestle with here at CRN. We don't have a full answer yet; indeed, we don't even know exactly what questions to ask, because we don't know whether molecular manufacturing will be accessible for legal civilian purposes. If it's only available on the black market, then it'll have less economic impact -- while having a very large negative impact on security and policing.
But if we figure that commercial interests will develop very inexpensive manufacturing of high-quality goods, then we have to ask several interesting questions: How much wealth concentration will result, and what will be the effects of that? How many people will be out of work? How will they get the necessary resources to live?
It does appear likely that product manufacturing, shipping, and warehousing costs will drop faster than prices, causing profits to rise at least for a while. I'm enough of a capitalist to believe that wealth concentration isn't automatically harmful. And I'm not enough of an economist to know whether extremes of wealth concentration can be directly harmful to an economy, or whether the harms are only indirect, through human psychology. It may be that falling prices will create new opportunities due to greater sales volume. This needs to be looked at in detail.
In the US, we went from tens of percent of the population farming, to about 2% farming, in just one century. That's a lot of people "out of work" but manufacturing filled the gap. If we go from tens of percent manufacturing to 2%, in a decade or less, will we find something else to fill the gap? Probably -- there are already more people in "service" jobs than in manufacturing. Will most individuals be able to find new jobs that provide a living wage? I don't know. I also don't know much about job breakdowns in other countries. Again, this needs to be looked at in detail.
If people are thrown out of work wholesale, can they stay alive and happy without receiving an employment wage? Even in the US, there are some interesting options. People living in Alaska are paid about $1000 per year by the government, just for living in a state with a lot of oil. If molecular manufacturing reshapes the economy, a similar but larger payment, funded by existing taxes on (much larger) corporate profits, might be a substantial help. There may be other ways of delivering money without going through the traditional charity infrastructures (welfare, religious charity, etc). And this also needs to be looked at in much more detail.
But the bottom line is that the resources available to people from molecular manufacturing, like so much else, will depend on policies that people and governments choose. If the Open Source model is allowed to coexist with the Commercial model, as we believe it should be, then there will be a readily-available nearly-free supply of the necessities of life -- along with a much more attractive and expensive supply of goods for those who can afford them.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be difficult to rig the game so that almost everyone got very poor and almost no one with influence cared. The best thing I can say about that scenario is that it would probably result in low levels of innovation; in the end, nations that allowed more innovation would out-compete the "concentration" model.
We believe that all these questions, along with questions of politics, policing, environment, and health, need to be studied in detail before molecular manufacturing arrives. So far, this is not looking very likely. As a result, civilization will blunder forward blindfolded, and probably trip on something.
Chris Phoenix
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog
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