Will Atomically-precise Manufacturing End Luxury?

WILL ATOMICALLY-PRECISE MANUFACTURING END LUXURY?

In this essay, I ask the question ‘will atomically-precise manufacturing’ (an as-yet theoretical manufacturing capability that builds things bottom-up by mechanically guiding chemical reactions) end luxury?’.

(An animation showing how APM works.)

When I say ‘end luxury’ I do not mean luxury itself will become impossible. Far from it. The capability APM would have to precisely build anything physically possible with an absolute minimum of waste would enable far greater access to the world’s wealth than is possible today, which should result in levels of prosperity being dramatically raised. Instead, what I mean is, would APM mean there is no longer any justifiable reason to divide goods between luxury and affordable products?

Materials

Let’s look at the reasons why I think that may be so. The first has to do with material resources. When we look around us, we see products built out of an enormous variety of materials. You have things made out of plastic, things made out of wood, things made out of metals, things made out of fibres, the list goes on and on. Furthermore, you can divide those materials into different kinds. In the case of wood you have Oak, Teak, Mahogany, Pine…

Some of these materials are more expensive than others, often because they are not as widely available. You typically pay more for a diamond than you do for a plank of wood, for example, because diamonds are harder to obtain. But look more closely at all this bewildering complexity of materials and you will see that the sheer variety is not nearly so great as it first appears. Take wood and diamonds (since we mentioned them already) and include coal. They look like three entirely different materials but actually they are all configurations of carbon atoms. Indeed, everything you see around you is ultimately made up of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, and trace amounts of a few other elements. So once we acquire the ability to manufacture products with atomic precision, the raw stock of materials needed to make anything collapses from the thousands of materials required today, to just a few elements. Furthermore, those elements are abundantly available for the most part, especially if you factor in space-based resource gathering. Again, diamonds may be rare and expensive but carbon is abundantly available. So if you can supply an APM with a feedstock of carbon and output a supply of diamonds, why should diamonds (indeed, anything) remain the luxury item they are today?

The manufacturing process

Diamonds do not come out of the ground resembling the dazzling jewels we see adorning rings and other accessories. The raw material must first be cut and polished. As well as many different materials, the stuff we see around us requires many different manufacturing techniques. The process for turning wood pulp into paper requires quite different equipment from the process for turning iron ore into metals. Also, different methods require different amounts of human labour, both in terms of quantity and skill. Some items rely on the coordinated labour of many hundreds of hands, much of whom may be low-skilled, whereas others are produced single-handedly by an individual possessed of rare talent. This, too, results in products having different prices, with some branded luxuries and others thought of as cheaper products.

For example, I recall this man who hand-carves guitars out of a particular kind of wood that is now almost impossible to source. Both the rarity of the material and the exceptional talent the man has for carving guitars out of it makes the finished product highly sought after. Even if you are Eric Clapton you still have to join a waiting list and wait months for a musical instrument that is quite out of the price-range for most people.

But once atomically-precise manufacturing is achieved, all the various ways we go about creating stuff in top-down fashion- all that cutting, moulding, baking, shaping, and all the great variety of skills required to produce the stuff around us- can be manufactured by the same technique. Raw material in the form of chemical feedstock goes in one end. Microblocks are then manufactured out of that feedstock in an entirely automated process, those microblocks are then used to manufacture components (again, entirely automated), the components are then brought together to make more macro-scale parts and at the end of the process we have...well, anything so long as it is physically possible and we have the instructions to build it from the chemical feedstock all the way to the finished product.

In the case of a diamond ring or one of those guitars I mentioned earlier, a process of atomically-precise disassembly could take apart such a product, map its molecular structure, and then reconstruct copies of that object. Unlike with our current attempts to recreate things, which invariably includes mistakes due to the inefficiency with which we handle materials and the fact that sometimes rare craftsmanship is necessary, atomically-precise manufacturing would turn out products that are absolutely identical. A guitar manufactured this way will be as good in quality as the guitar it precisely copied so if you supply it with one of those high-quality hand-crafted guitars or a diamond cut by the exacting hand of the world’s greatest jeweller, it will turn out guitars, diamonds, in fact anything to the exact same standard. Bear in mind that the entire process would be automatic. These machines don’t care if they are manufacturing high-performance Ferraris or bone-shaking jalopies, they will obediently mass-produce whatever they are instructed to compile out of abundantly-available raw materials. So why can’t we all have cars as beautiful as the most coveted vehicles in the world today, packed with state-of-the-art safety features, accessories and everything else? Really, the cost difference would be negligible, so from a practical standpoint, there really would be no reason why anyone should have to settle for less than the best we know how to make, because once an item exists it can be mapped by disassemblers and perfectly recreated again and again by APM.

Provenance

Having said that I should point out that there is something that cannot be reproduced. Sometimes the history of an object confers great value upon it. A possession may come to acquire great value because of who owned it or who was involved in its production. Depending on how you look at it, there are millions of Mona Lisa’s in the world today, printed on posters, postcards, in digital format, and so on. Or, there is only one Mona Lisa and it is on display at the Louvre. I reckon most people would say that there is only one Mona Lisa and to be able to say ‘I own it’ requires possession of the painting that the art experts of the world agree was painted by Da Vinci. Even if you could arrange to have that original disassembled and then perfectly recreated, your copy is not the original and so it has far less value.

So I do not think coveted items are going to disappear completely because there will always be those rare items that were once owned by historically-important figures. It is even possible that the very ability to produce perfect copies of such items would only serve to increase the value of things that are deemed by experts to be ‘the real thing’.

But for everything else, the same manufacturing process, working with the same few abundantly available raw materials, could mass-produce any product you can think of to the best standard possible. Just provide it the requisite instructions (we can already copy instructions thanks to the digitisation of information) and the APM will create exact copies thanks to its ability to handle matter with digital control. There would be no practical reason for anything to be more or less expensive than anything else. Putting to one side objects with provenance attached, if we do continue to differentiate between luxury and ordinary products in a world with APM manufacturing, it will be because of bullshit reasons to do with stubbornly persistent scarcity-based thinking, not because we don’t have the power to end want of luxury.

REFERENCES

“Radical Abundance” By K. Eric Drexler.

“The Singularity Is Near” by Ray Kurzweil