Re: 2 new messages in 2 topics - digest
- From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:36:01 -0500
"Winston Smith" writes:
Lets say the U.S. government were to offer a prize of $1 trillion to the
first person to build an assembler. Completely tax free of course.
This would be quite an incentive for anyone. Do you think we would see one
within a few years?
I think it is best to leave speculation to topics that are likely to
have some vague plausibility associated with them. However, I suspect
it would not have that result.
There is more than a few years worth of work involved, and putting
more people on a project like this in short order does not generally
make it happen faster, any more than nine women can have one baby in
one month. Scale-up from near $0 to vast sums being spent on a project
either happens reasonably slowly or happens incredibly inefficiently,
and the complexity of the problem is much larger than, for example,
that of the Manhattan Project, and there are (currently) far fewer
qualified people to work on it.
Perry
.
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