ts can be built quite rapidly. Finally, it appears that the materials produced by the manufacturing system may be extremely high-performance, allowing products to be far more compact and powerful. The section on "Risks and Benefits of Molecular Manufacturing" discusses some implications of the technology.
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Exponential general-purpose molecular manufacturing -- thatís a mouthful, but what does it mean? Letís take the phrase apart to see why it is so important.
MANUFACTURING: The ability to make products, in this case ranging from clothing, to electronics, to medical devices, to books, to building materials, and much more.
MOLECULAR manufacturing: The automated building of products from the bottom up, molecule by molecule, with atomic precision. This will make products that are extremely lightweight, flexible, durable, and potentially very Ďsmartí.
GENERAL-PURPOSE molecular manufacturing: A manufacturing technology that will find many applications across many segments of society. Its extreme flexibility, precision, high capacity, and low cost will cause rapid adoption almost everywhere, and therefore will have disruptive effects in many industries.
EXPONENTIAL general-purpose molecular manufacturing: The word exponential refers to the rapid pace -- probably unprecedented -- at which this technology may be deployed. A compact automated molecular manufacturing system will be able to make more manufacturing systems. Weíre talking about factories that can build duplicate factories -- and probably do it in less than a single day. The math is simple: if one factory makes two, and two factories make four, then within ten days you could have one thousand factories, in ten more days a million factories, and ten days after that a billion factories. Within the span of just a few weeks, in theory, every household in the world could have one of their own, to make most of the products they need, at just the cost of raw materials.
Exponential general-purpose molecular manufacturing means a manufacturing system capable of making a wide range of technologically advanced products, far superior to what we have today, much cheaper, much faster, and able to multiply its own source of production exponentially.
From Responsible Nanotechnology. See Unanswered Questions, Part 1 for details and comments.