A strong singularity scenario in which the creation
of the first general assembler is followed by an
instant surge in the availability of material items.
The idea is that by the time we manage to actually
build a general assembler, rather than more limited
industrial assemblers, we will have accumulated a
huge number of basic designs for nearly everything
that we want. There will be off the shelf nanotech
blueprints for everything needed for day to day life:
clothes, food, transportation, medication, games,
sporting equipment, mousepads, furniture, etc. Two
weeks after the creation of the first general assembler,
all of this will have percolated through society and we'll
be left trying to deal with the after effects of sudden boundless material wealth.
Even if one were to grant that all (or even most) of the basic
designs exist, itself a dubious proposition, there is a more
subtle flaw in this idea. Essentially, all of these designs
for real, honest-to-goodness, I can pick it up and smack you
upside the head with it physical objects are nothing more
than pieces of software; software that has never been tested. They're
not actually even software yet--they're source code that's never even been
fed through a compiler. Regardless of how good our programming tools
are none of those initial designs are going to work. Most
of them probably won't even build structurally stable objects, they'll just
disintegrate into dust, or fail to materialize, or something.
This revolution will take more than two weeks.
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