Worthless Replicators

Futurists often think that self-replicating machines will change everything. But It's possible to imagine a world where self-replicating technological systems are common, but nobody bothers to use them because they are economically and militarily worthless. In a world with relatively strong property rights and relatively low transportation costs, this could be the expected state of affairs.

The key insight here is that a civilization (meaning a combination of machines, ideas, and people) already is a self-replicating technological system, and every part of that system will always be able to operate more efficiently, through specialization and economies of scale, than anything at the same tech level that must also be small, portable, self-contained, and/or limited to local resources.

It's pretty much a guarantee that no matter what level of technology you have, the output of a portable fabber system is always going to be worse than the output of a factory. Mass production of a single thing by a large facility designed to do that thing will always be more efficient than production from a device that must be small and capable of flexible output. This is true no matter what tech level you have; any tech that makes a fabber work better can also make a factory work better.

For example, in our world, it's easy to see that the output of a printing company is always going to be better, and cheaper per page before delivery costs, then something that you print out of your home printer. Sure, the output of your home printer might be better and cheaper than the output of a printing company in the 1950's. But someone in the 1950's who correctly predicted the capacity of a home printer, and then predicted that nobody would ever buy a printed book or magazine because the home printer could print things on demand more cheaply, would be mistaken. The factory tech also advanced.

It is certainly possible to have a world where all of the components of a replicator can easily come out of a factory, but the output of that replicator (be it useful things or other replicators) would be much more expensive, in terms of resources and time, than the factory version.

It should also be easy to see that any weapon or military system with the design constraint "Must be capable of self-replicating" will be far less cost-efficient than any weapon of a similar tech level that does not have that design constraint. A military power that builds a lot of self-replicating weapons will lose to a power that spends similar amounts of resources on building non-replicating weapons.

People seem to think that resources no longer matter once you have self-replication. But this is not true at all. Any resource that can be consumed by a replicator can also be fed into a factory, and the factory will do a much better job of converting that resource into wealth or power or whatever else you care about.

People also assume that self-replicators will dominate everything because of their capacity for exponential growth. But that implicitly assumes that the adversary is doing nothing with that time. All well-functioning economies grow exponentially whenever they have access to resources, and they do so at a rate based on their productive efficiency. Sure, if you drop a self-replicating weapon in the arctic tundra, then in 100 years you might have billions of drone weapons. But an adversary civilization that spent 100 years converting a similar mass of arctic tundra into weapons using factories will have far more of them (and their weapons will all be 100 years more technologically advanced than yours, and your drone control system is 100 years old and probably easily hacked by modern tech).

On both long and short time scales, factory output dominates. In the short run, they can pump out thousands of things while you are on the first few generations of replication. And in the long run, their increased efficiency and technological advancement will allow them to exponentially increase their productive capacity at a faster rate than your replicators. Your replicators may be doubling every month, but their economy is doubling output every week. You are building things to a more restrictive design constraint, while they can use that tech to crank out specialized factories that efficiently build weapons and factory components.

Of course, all this is before travel costs. If you want to turn an asteroid into a colony, moving the factory to the asteroid is going to be much cheaper than moving the asteroid to Earth and then shooting the factory output back into space. But even in this situation, there is little economic incentive for self-replication. A machine (or system of machines and people) that turns an asteroid into a colony will always have much better performance if it does not also need to be able to create a new colony-creation machine in the process.

So even in the case of a spacefaring civilization with access to self-replication technology, it seems like there's very little economic or military incentive to drop a replicator in an asteroid belt and have it convert the belt into something. No matter what you're trying to accomplish, deploying something built in a large modern efficient factory would always be able to do it better, faster, and cheaper.

The only real motivation for using completely self-replicating systems is independence. If you want to be liberated from the large efficient systems that enable modern civilization, then a self-replicating system loaded with all the important knowledge of civilization can do it for you. But your quality of life, per resources spent, will be far lower than any citizen of that civilization. It will also be significantly lower than anyone who wants to live off the grid but does not insist that their off-grid house and fabber be capable of self-replicating.

Some people will choose to do this, but they will only exist as long as a large civilization actively protects them. They will be utterly incapable of resisting any kind of military aggression, and they are sitting on useful resources. Anything that is capable of sustaining them is also capable of generating wealth for the larger more efficient civilization. So they will never have any real independence in a geopolitical sense, and will always be dependent on a sovereign power for protection.

It will be a performative delusion of independence, probably nestled safely in the territory of a major power while paying property taxes. And this is only possible if the property taxes are a tiny fraction of the economic worth of the resources; if taxes are higher and based on market rates, then the controller of the replicator will never be able to afford them, because the large-scale systems are capable of generating much more wealth from those resources than the smaller systems whose efficiency is constrained by a need to self-replicate.

So in whatever sci-fi setting you like, be it plausible hard sci-fi or something like the worlds of Star Trek or Star Wars, self-replicating systems could be kind of like bitcoin. There's a bunch of random tech geeks that swear it's the next thing, but nobody's ever actually able to find a practical case for it. Occasionally their community makes a useful tech breakthrough, which is immediately absorbed into existing systems and used to make them better.

Some rando could think they're wealthy or powerful because they control a Jupiter-sized mass of mobile self-replicating probes, but traders don't buy anything from them because other people are selling it more cheaply, and any military power's reaction is "Whatever. I could destroy that in an instant but I just don't feel like it right now"

Estimate of Potential Externality-tax Revenues in the USA

A colleague asked me to estimate how much money the USA could raise by taxing externalities equal to the damage they cause. This is the kind of thing that should be done by a team of competent experts, but apparently nobody with resources has even bothered to ask the question, so I took a shot at it:

CBO's list of budget options estimates about $100B per year from a carbon tax set at the estimated social cost of carbon. In order to be sensible (i.e. non-distortionary and having a chance of passing), you would also need a 'carbon tariff' i.e. taxing all imports on their estimated carbon emissions. Ideally at a slightly higher rate for political reasons and to compensate for enforcement or estimation errors. Imports are 15% of GDP, so assume $120B from carbon tax and tariff.

After that it's all napkin math. We know the harms of various externalities, so we can calculate their social cost, but we don't know how much of that we could capture with a tax. 

Air pollution kills about 100k Americans per year. I'll assume that 50% to 90% of this would get engineered out in response to the tax, and the rest hangs around to be taxed. With 10k to 50k deaths remaining and taxed at the $10M VSL, you raise $100-500 billion.

The economic costs of alcohol are about $250 billion. This does not count the monetized costs of the 2 million lost QALYs. (I had to do the QALY calculation by multiplying their 'years lived with a disability' by the QALY cost of 0.3, assuming an average of mild and moderate QALY loss. At $500k a pop, the monetized QALY cost of alcohol is about $1 trillion a year ($1.3 trillion total cost). With that level of social harm, the question then becomes how much money you can possibly extract from the alcohol market without the market going to organized crime. Annual alcohol sales are a quarter trillion, and maybe you could double or triple the prices before drinkers go to drug gangs instead (or quit), so that is $250-$500 billion in possible taxes.

Bad diet causes a loss of about 10M DALYs a year in the USA (source, use the 'plot option'). Again, I assume that tax-induced behavior change and reformulation would eliminate 50-90% of the harm, leaving 1-5M DALYs lost, or $500-2500 billion in potential taxes. Then assume that a quarter to a half of this is eventually lost to gray-market evasion. (buying a hunk of pig with cash from a local farmer)

Plug all that into your favorite Monte Carlo software:

The 90% CI for taxes raised on unhealthy food $250-1000 billion. The 90% CI for all my health-harm estimates, added up, is $800-1700 billion. Add in the carbon tax, and another 100-200 billion from other kinds of externalities, and you get about one to two trillion per year. 

Probably the only way that all this could be politically acceptable is if it funded a UBI, basically making it revenue-neutral by giving all American adults their share of the tax. With 250 million adults, this gets you a $4-8k UBI per person.

Roaring 20s

I am confident about the upcoming decade. I think by the end of it, the current mess will be mostly over and we will be on track for a good sustainable semi-utopian future for humanity. I'll briefly list the reasons below. Even if you don't share my overall optimism, please at least consider these as good and interesting developments to watch out for.

Biotechnology: Things will start to arrive in a big way. By the end of the decade, we will see many new medical treatments, improved industrial processes, efficient carbon sinks, etc. Things will only just be getting started, relative to their potential, but a lot of good things will have already happened and people will understand that more good stuff is coming. 

Plant-based meat: Impossible Foods is shooting for 2022 as the year that high-quality plant-based burger patties become as cheap as the dead-cow version. I'll apply the 'Elon Musk Adjustment' to that goal and say it will probably happen between 2023 and 2027. Assuming they (or someone with similar tech) can scale up production, people will be able to conveniently replace most of their meat consumption, giving us a huge win for health, environment, and ethics.

Scientific Research: We have learned many lessons from the replication crisis. Data openness is now an established thing. By the end of the decade, most research will be freely available, with all source data online in ways that allow not just for replication and error-checking, but also massive meta-analyses that give us highly-powered studies to untangle a lot of hard questions.

Renewable Energy: With continued progress in solar and next-gen nuclear power, we should see grid parity in lots of places by the end of the decade. Between this and plant-based meat, our carbon footprint should start to get a lot smaller.

Space Travel. I am pretty confident that we will have a manned research outpost on Mars by the end of the decade, as well as the beginnings of a space-based economic infrastructure with asteroid mining etc. that will allow humanity to really start expanding beyond our home planet.

Politics: If you take a step back from the hype cycle of people trying to generate clicks by preying on your negative emotions, you will realize that the current mess shows just how resilient the system is. Most of the day-to-day details of governance, like food safety inspections, are ticking along in regular order despite the chaos and dysfunction that grabs the headlines. Just like with all the crap and violence in the 60s and 70s (which was much worse than the last two decades) by the end of the decade people should settle down and realize that we are all in this together and things are mostly okay.

Consumer Tech: Never underestimate the capacity of our civilization to create compelling consumer products. I won't make any predictions about specific things, but by the end of the decade, there will probably be at least one thing that generates value and convenience equivalent to the introduction of smartphones.

Logistics: Just as in the military, in the civilian economy the professionals talk logistics. By the end of the decade, much of the warehousing and delivery infrastructure will be extensively automated, making everything that can be delivered in a box cheaper and more convenient to purchase. This improved supply chain efficiency will have more of an immediate macroeconomic effect than anything (possibly everything) else on the list, significantly lowering consumer goods price inflation.

Basic Income: If you don't need the services of a credentialed professional, or space in a high-rent area, a good life is already incredibly cheap. Not counting rent and health insurance, I pay about $300 a month for a lifestyle that would seem shockingly rich and comfortable to anyone other than a modern professional. The basic essentials of life are only going to get cheaper in real terms. By the end of the decade, there will be a growing realization that wealthy countries can and should give their citizens a basic income of about $5,000 a year (i.e. spending about 10% of their GDP). Living only on this would require you to live in the boonies, and will only buy a 'minimal' standard of basic health care (i.e. the stuff that you could get 40 years ago, but of better quality), and you couldn't afford any expensive hobbies like drinking, but this would essentially end deprivation and exploitation.

Add all of this up, and we will be well on our way to a Star Trek kind of world, 100 years ahead of schedule (assuming we can skip the Eugenics Wars).