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Thursday, May 30, 2024

We'll know we've reached the mythical "AGI" when we can create autonomous industrial facilities on the Moon, Mars, and asteroids

Tyler Cowen recently had a conversation with Michael Nielson, which ranged all over the place, as Cowen's conversations tend to do. Here's snippet:

COWEN: You have reason to think we’re going to last a thousand years in a civilized state. Not every person dead —

NIELSEN: I think getting off planet Earth and establishing a civilization elsewhere is very, very important. Yes. Very hard for economic reasons but utterly crucial.

COWEN: Robots, in a sense, make it harder because you could send robots to Mars to do whatever might be economically useful there, means you never work hard on having humans do it.

NIELSEN: Yes, that’s true. We’re pretty curious.

COWEN: The robot will take perfect footage. Whatever is there, the robot will send back to us. You’ll have your whatever is the current version of Apple Vision Pro on. It will seem very realistic.

NIELSEN: You’re an economist. I’m a romantic, I think.

[laughter]

NIELSEN: Might be the difference.

COWEN: We’d have to settle them at scale, so 20 people on Mars limping along.

NIELSEN: Oh, we’re talking about a million people, not 20 people.

COWEN: If we can do a million, we can do a billion, I would think.

Perhaps we'll colonize Mars, perhaps we won't. That's not what interests me at the moment. What interests me is the possibility of creating and maintaining infrastructure, robots, and manufacturing infrastructure on Mars. Will that one day be possible? I don't know & I don't have a strong opinion either way. I note, however, that at the present we're a long way from having robots that could do all the physical tasks necessary to assemble and maintain manufacturing infrastructure. I'm thinking in particular of bottom-level locomotion and physical manipulation.

Beyond that, there's the business of managing the activity. It's all well and good that we now have LLMs that can craft fluid prose on a wide variety of subjects and are useful in writing computer code. But it will take a lot more than that to run a factory. Among other things, that will require sophisticated planning capabilities, which are currently beyond the capacities of LLMs. But I don't see any reason why we could develop that technology. LLMs are NOT the end of the technology pipeline. There's more to come.

Finally, I note that what Mars is too far away for real-time monitoring and control from earth, it's certainly possible for human operators on earth to perform various high-level analytic and planning tasks if that proves necessary. If we can create and maintain autonomous facilities on Mars, the Moon, and asteroids, that operate a decade or more without on-site human intervention, I'd say that, yes, we've achieve AGI, whatever that is. As for superintelligence, at that point, who cares?

There's been a fair amount of conceptual work on self-replicating factories. In particular, I recommend study undertaken by NASA in the summer of 1980: Replicating systems concepts: Self-replicating lunar factory and demonstration. From the Introduction:

As the cost of fossil-fuel energy continues to escalate and supplies of readily accessible high-grade ores and minerals gradually become depleted, the utilization of non- terrestrial sources of energy and materials and the develop- ment of a nonterrestrial industrial capacity become increasingly desirable. The Moon offers plentiful supplies of important minerals and has a number of advantages for manufacturing which make it an attractive candidate factory site compared to Earth. Given the expense and danger associated with the use of human workers in such a remote location, the production environment of a lunar manufac turing facility should be automated to the highest degree feasible. The facility ought also to be flexible, so that its product stream is easily modified by remote control and requires a minimum of human tending. However, sooner or later the factory must exhaust local mineral resources and fall into disrepair or become obsolete or unsuitable for changing human requirements. This will necessitate either replacement or overhaul, again requiring the presence of human construction workers with the associated high costs and physical hazards of such work.

The Replicating Systems Concepts Team proposes that this cycle of repeated construction may possibly be largely eliminated by designing the factory as an automated, multi- product, remotely controlled, reprogrammable Lunar Manufacturing Facility (LMF) capable of constructing duplicates of itself which would themselves be capable of further replication. Successive new systems need not be exact copies of the original, but could, by remote design and control, be improved, reorganized, or enlarged so as to reflect changing human requirements. Afew of the benefits of a replicative growing lunar manufacturing facility (discussed at greater length in secs. 5.4 and 5.5) include:

(1) The process of LMF design will lead to the develop- ment of highly sophisticated automated processing and assembly technologies. These could be used on Earth to further enhance human productivity and could lead to the emergence of novel forms of large-scale industrial organization and control.

(2) The self-replicating LMF can augment global industrial production without adding to the burden on Earth's limited energy and natural resources.

(3) An autonomous, growing LMF could, unaided, construct additional production machinery, thus increasing its own output capacity. By replicating, it enlarges these capabilities at an increasing rate since new production machinery as well as machines to make new machines can be constructed.

(4) The initial LMF may be viewed as the first step in a demonstration-development scenario leading to an indefinite process of automated exploration and utilization of nonterrestrial resources. (See fig. 5.1.) Replicating factories should be able to achieve a very general manufacturing capability including such products as space probes, plane- tary landers, and transportable "seed" factories for siting on the surfaces of other worlds. A major benefit of replicating systems is that they will permit extensive exploration and utilization of space without straining Earth's resources.

Read the whole thing. It'll give you a decent overview of what's required. While you're at it, read this post from 2017: Summer 1981, When I advised NASA on their computing infrastructure. That's when I learned about that NASA study and made my own contribution to the effort: An Executive Guide to the Computer Age.

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