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Algernoq comments on In order to greatly reduce X-risk, design self-replicating spacecraft without AGI - Less Wrong Discussion
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The key obstacle here is startup money. If self-replication is economically sound, then a convincing business case could be made, leading to startup funding and a trillion-dollar business.
Again, the problem is a realistic economic assessment of development cost and predicted profit. In the current funding market, there is a lot of capital chasing very few good ideas. If there is money to be made here (a big if, given low cost of manual labor) then this could be a good opportunity.
"Mining the moon" is probably too expensive to start up. Better to start with a self-replicating robot factory on Earth.
I might look at this financial analysis as a side project. Contact me if you want to get involved and have sufficient industry experience to know what you don't know.
One of the prototypical payoffs that could be had with self-replication that I have seen mentioned is solar farms in the desert that live off sand or rocks and produce arbitrarily large acreage of photovoltaics that can then be used as a replacement for oil. This requires full self-replication, including chemical raw material processing, which is not easy to demonstrate.
I am not sure a good business case could be made for the more limited form of self-replication where the "raw material" is machine parts that only need to be assembled. That would be much easier to demonstrate, so I think a business case for it would be extremely valuable.