Soul Bound

1        Soul Bound

1.2      Taking Control

1.2.6    An Assumed Role

1.2.6.7  The grey goo fallacy

Nadine: “So I’ll ask again: why has this not yet taken over the world?”

Heather: “I think, eventually, it will. John Chapman was a bare-foot preacher who spent his life wandering the Eastern coast of America, talking about the happiness of simple living and planting nurseries of cider-apple trees.”

John? Apples? The penny dropped.

Nadine: “Johnny Appleseed!”

Heather: “Exactly. Everyone has heard of him. An icon of the replantation movement trying to reverse the 20th century deforestation. But not until 200 years after his death. My point being that self-replicating things will spread, but they won’t necessarily spread particularly fast. The conditions have to be right. Means, motive and opportunity.”

Nadine: “You’ve lost me.”

Nadine went over to sit on her flying seat, and settled back to listen. Heather handed her a bottle of water and paced up and down as she spoke; a bundle of nervous energy, trying to use her arms to corral the ideas she was trying to capture.

Heather: “Let me try starting in a different place. What’s a ‘post-scarcity’ economy?”

Nadine: “When nothing is scarce? There’s an abundance of everything?”

Heather shook her head.

Heather: “There will never be enough original Ming dynasty vases to satisfy all the collectors, nor will the supply of them ever increase. You can’t please everyone.”

Nadine: “So how do you define it?”

Heather: “When clean water, good food, safe shelter and reliable information are cheap and plentiful enough that, for 95% or more of the population, shortage of them is no longer a primary factor in their decision making. They’ve moved onto higher layers of Maslow’s Hierarchy. They’re no longer pure materialists, driven by an overwhelming fear that if they don’t stockpile enough while the going’s good, they might find their survival threatened later.”

Nadine: “Still sounds pretty Utopian.”

Heather: “Some countries got close, back in the 1990s, with over half the population deciding how many children to have based not on shortage of rooms or food or even the cost of education because education was free - they went with the number they wanted, the number they felt they could pay attention to and raise well.”

Nadine: “But nowhere near 95%.”

Heather: “We’ve advantages they didn’t have then; primarily better expert systems, but also better materials and cheaper power. I’m being conservative. Many are also pushing for abundant travel and access to an abundant diversity of social groups; abundant advice and skill training; abundant opportunities to live free, creative and fulfilling lives.”

Nadine: “OK, I take it back; you’re on the practical end of the spectrum. But is even the limited definition you use achievable?”

Heather: “That’s more than just a question about technology. The problem is, some people like scarcity. Being able to control if someone else has enough food gives them power. And it isn’t just politicians. Companies want to make a profit selling products; and if those products are not strictly necessary, they’ll use marketing to persuade people that they want them anyway. The less satisfied people are with simple living, the further away we are from being able to provide them with enough material objects for them to move onto worrying about higher level things.”

Nadine: “Such as the survival of our entire species?”

Heather: “Exactly. The cheaper we make the basics, the more money people have to spend on luxuries, the bigger the potential reward for companies that persuade them that they absolutely must have a Version 9.3 Onion Squeezer rather than last year’s hopelessly unfashionable Version 9.2 which is a different shade of puce. Their homes fill up with rarely used gadgets, and then they want larger homes to store them, which consume more electricity to heat or cool. It’s a never ending rat race.”

She paused to take stock, aware she’d gone off on a tangent. Had she asked Tink to help her stay on track? Nadine thought she was starting to recognise a slight head-tilt Heather got when listening to something through orglife.

Nadine: “So what are the preconditions for getting your seeds to spread fast enough to overcome that resistance, rather than fizzle out? How fast can they replicate when unopposed?”

Heather: “That’s a good question. Let me refine it a bit further, before answering it.”

Nadine: “Ok.”

Heather: “The most constrained environment is isolation, like you’d get on a remote colony planet. After initial setup you have no aid, no trade, no sharing of new designs or help with adapting them, no exchange of people. A closed system. Entirely self-reliant.”

Nadine: “Hardcore. Can you even get that on Earth?”

Heather: “Maybe. Hunted groups working off-the-grid with no safe communications, shunned countries facing a total embargo for political reasons. If you have to mine all your own raw materials, and work all your way up to the full capabilities of our current civilisation before replicating, you’re looking at a very large seed or a replication time measured in decades.”

Nadine: “Let’s assume safe communications, so there’s sharing of designs and advice.”

Heather: “That’s an economic autarchy. The sort of self-sustaining outpost you might try to create in the asteroid belt, with exchange of people and ideas but no significant physical aid or trade. If you’re willing to settle for reaching just self-sufficiency in food and other survival basics before trying to replicate, then depending upon the amount of mining and refining machines in the initial seed you could be talking only years rather than decades.”

Nadine: “That’s slower than I thought.”

Heather: “They couldn’t specialise. They’d have to have advanced food production, chemical production, advanced mining and refining. They’d have to construct lots of things just to build a habitat able to keep people alive out in space. The killer factor is building enough computers to run all their own expert systems.”

Nadine: “Let’s stick to just the Earth, where the people will already have houses, so you only need to build the buildings or caverns that will hold the machines. And let’s allow trade, so different villages or individuals can specialise in different areas.”

Heather: “Being able to trade with other partners, whether from the old existing economy, or from the movement, helps enormously. Borrow the minimum amount, start with a small seed, specialise in a niche where there’s a demand and sell your products in exchange for materials and computing resources from the cloud. When you’ve paid off your debt, start building a seed for someone else. If someone is dedicated, and reads the market correctly, they could manage it in a few months.”

Nadine tried to hide the disappointment in her voice. “Well, that’s pretty good. It would be enough to give someone independence. They’d retain the ability to become self-sufficient if they had to, so there wouldn’t be much point to threatening them with an embargo, except to slow things down. And once they’d paid off their debt to buy the initial seed, they could produce more seeds for sale themselves at a faster rate than one every three months, if they felt like doing so.”

Heather: “You only asked about how fast a self-contained seed could replicate when unopposed. But what if we go in the opposite direction, using a franchise model, and ask about the speed when aided? What if the initial seed doesn’t have to contain everything, because the target village already has some robots, and because the initial seed will get backed up by an ongoing stream of resources and encouragement from mentors as the proud new seed planter works through a ‘bootstrap tutorial’ on their way towards becoming a respected contributor to a distributed community?”

Nadine felt a surge of hope. “How long? If the aid model scales as the movement grows exponentially, how long would it take for each doubling of the number of nodes in the community?”

Heather: “Assuming the new member initially allocates 75% of their output into growing their own system then growing seeds, until they’ve spread their first two seeds onwards, and keeps allocating at least 25% of their output into helping others for a few months after that…”

Nadine: “Yes…?”

Heather: “Two weeks.”

Nadine: “Wow. Just two weeks - you’re sure?”

Heather: “Not entirely; but you’ve seen what I’ve managed here over the last 6 days. Right now I could start producing bots and machines for someone else, and given a week longer I could have a complete seed ready to deliver, consisting of copies of all the machines I started out with here. And then keep doing that at a rate of 1 seed per week. More if I scaled things here up further. Fewer if I also had to make things to sell to provide funding for resources to be sent to them or to pay back my own debt. But, just on the technical factors, yes, I’ve run the models and two weeks is about right for the long term doubling period. This isn’t a scam or pyramid scheme. The opposite, in fact.”

Nadine: “So the uncertainty isn’t from the technical factors?”

Heather: “Right. We don’t know how many would just take their seed then drop out or give up part way through the bootstrap phase. We don’t know how many people would be willing to switch their mindset. We don’t know how easy it would be for each node to find new people to pass seeds onto. And, remember, we’re assuming no opposition or sabotage, no campaigns painting these people as tax-evading traitors to their countries, as terrorists able to fabricate bio-weapons; no manufactured stories of people accidentally blowing themselves up, going bankrupt or poisoning their children with boobytrap blueprints submitted by psychos.”

Nadine: “But if things go well?”

Heather: “Doubling every 2 weeks is enough to go from 1 seed to more than a million, in under a year. If we can use existing manufacturing to kick-start the project with 1000 seeds, we could have a crafting node for every village on the planet in under half a year.”