I think you're substantially underestimating the difficulty here, and the proportion of effort which goes into the "starter pack" (aka vitamins) relative to steelworking.

If you're interested in taking this further, I'd suggest:

• getting involved in the RepRap project
• initially focusing on just one of producing parts, assembling parts, or controlling machinery. If your system works when teleoperated, or can assemble but not produce a copy of itself, etc., that's already a substantial breakthrough.
• reading up on NASA's studies on self-replicating machinery, e.g. Freitas 1981 or this paper from 1982 or later work like Chirikjian 2004.

This was a very interesting post.  A few scattered thoughts, as I try to take a step back and take a big-picture economic view of this idea:

What is an autofac?  It is a vastly simplified economy, in the hopes that enough simplification will unlock various big gains (like gains from "automation").  Let's interpolate between the existing global economy, and Feynman's proposed 1-meter cube.  It's not true that "the smallest technological system capable of physical self-reproduction is the entire economy.", since I can imagine many potential simplifications of the economy.  Imagine a human economy with everything the same, but no pianos, piano manufacturers, piano instructors, etc... the world would be a little sadder without pianos, but eliminating everything piano-related would slightly simplify the economy and probably boost overall productivity.  The dream of the Autofac involves many more such simplifications, of several types:

1. Eliminate luxuries (like pianos) and unnecessary complexity (do we really need 1000 types of car, instead of say, 5?  The existence of so many different car manufacturers and car models is an artifact of capitalist competition and consumer preferences, not a physical necessity.  Similarly, do we really need more than 5 different colors of paint / types of food / etc...).
2. Give up on internal production of certain highly complex products, like microchips, in order to further simplify the economy.  Keep giving up on more and more categories of complex products until your remaining internal economy is simple enough that you can automate the entire thing.  Hopefully, this remaining automated economy will still account for most of the mass/energy being manipulated, with only a small amount of imports (lubricants, electronics, etc) required.
   1. Why make such a fuss about disentangling a "fully automatable" simplified subset of the economy from a distant "home base" that exports microchips and lubricant?  I don't think a self-sufficient autofac plan would ever make sense in the middle of, say, the city of Shenzhen in China, when you are already surrounded by an incredibly complex manufacturing ecosystem that can easily provide whatever inputs you need.  I can think of two reasons why you might want to cleave an economy in half like this, rather than just cluster everything together in a normal Shenzhen-style agglomeration mishmash:
      1. If you want to industrialize a distant, undeveloped location, and the cost of shipping goods there is very high, then it makes sense to focus on producing the heaviest materials locally and importing the smallest / most complex / most value-per-kg stuff.
      2. If you can cut humans entirely out of the loop of the simplified half of the economy, then you don't have to import or produce any of the stuff humans need (food, housing, healthcare, etc), which is a big efficiency win.  This looks especially attractive if you want to industrialize a harsh, uninhabitable location (like Baffin Island, Antarctica, the Sahara desert, the bottom of the ocean, the moon, Mars, etc), where the costs of supporting humans are higher than normal.
3. Take an efficency hit in order to eliminate efficiency-boosting complexity.  Perhaps instead of myriad types of alloy, we could get by with just a handful.  Perhaps instead of myriad types of fastener, we could just use four standard sizes of screw.  Perhaps instead of lots of specialized machines, we could make many of our tools "by hand" using generalized machine-shop tools.
   1. But wait -- I thought we were trying to maximize economic growth?  Why give up things like carbide cutting tools in favor of inferior hardened-steel?  Well, the hope is that if we simplify the economy enough, it will be possible to "automate" this simplified economy, and the benefits of this automation will make up for the efficiency losses.
   2. Okay then, why does efficiency-imparing simplification help with automation?  Couldn't our autofac machine shop just as easily produce 10,000 types of fasteners, as 4 standard screws?  Especially since the autofacs are making so many things "by hand?"  Feynman seems very interested in an Autofac economy based almost entirely around steel -- what's the benefit of ditching useful materials like plastic, concrete, carbide, glass, rubber, etc?  I see a few potential benefits to efficiency-imparing simplifications:
      1. lt reduces the size/cost/complexity of the initial self-replicating system.  (I think this motivation is misplaced, and we should be shooting for a much larger initial size than 1 meter cubed.)
      2. It reduces the engineering effort needed to design the initial self-replicating system. (This motivation is reasonable, but it interacts in interesting ways with AI.)
      3. By trying to minimize the use of inputs like rubber and plastic, we reduce our reliance on rare natural resources like rubber trees and oil wells, neither of which exist on Baffin Island, or the moon, or etc.  (This motivation is reasonable, but it only applies to a few of the proposed simplifications.)

To me, it seems that the Autofac dream comes from a particular context -- mid-20th-century visions of space exploration -- that have unduly influenced Feynman's current concept.

• Why the emphasis on creating a very small, 1 meter cubed package size??  This is a great size for something that we are shipping to the moon on a Saturn V rocket, or landing on Mars via skycrane, or perhaps sending to a distant star system as a Von Neumann probe.  But for colonizing Baffin Island or the Sahara Desert or anywhere else on earth, we can use giant containter ships to easily move a much larger amount of stuff.  By increasing the minimum size of our self-replicating system, we can include lots of efficiency-boosting nice-to-haves (like different types of alloys, carbide cutting tools, lubricant factories, etc).  Feynman imagines initially releasing 1000 one-meter-cubed autofacs (and then supporting them with a continual stream of inputs), but I think we should instead design a single, 1000x-size autofac (it doesn't have to be one giant structure -- rather a network of factories, resource-gathering drones, steel mills, power plants, etc), since that would allow for more efficiency-boosting complexity.
  • The remaining argument for 1000 one-meter-cubed autofacs is that it would be easier to design this much-smaller, much-simpler product.  This is true!  I'll get back to this in a bit.
  • In general, I suspect that the ideal size of the autofac system should be proportional to the amount of transportation throughput you can support to Baffin Island / Mars / wherever.  Design effort aside, it would be ideal to design the largest and most complex possible autofac which would fit into your transportation budget (eg, if you can afford five container ships to Baffin Island per year, then your autofac system should be large enough to fit into five container ships.
• Cutting humans entirely out of the loop is very appealing for deep-space exploration, but less appealing for places like Baffin Island.  As long as you are only relying on relatively unskilled labor (such that you aren't worried about running out of humans to import, during the final stages of the industrialization of the island when millions and millions of windmills / steel mills / etc are going up), then importing a bunch of humans to handle a small percentage of high-value, hard-to-automate tasks, is probably worth it (even though it means you now have to provide housing, food, entertainment, law enforcement, etc).
  • As others have mentioned, this "compromise" vision seems similar to Tesla's dreams of robotic factory workers (in large, container-ship-sized factories that still employ some human workers) and Spacex's mars colonization plans (where you still have a few humans assembling a mostly-mechanical system of nuclear power plants and solar panels, habitable spaces, greenhouses for food, etc -- but no 1-meter cubes to be seen, since Starship can carry 100 tons at a time to Mars).
  • But again, I admit that re-complexifying the economy by introducing humans, does greatly increase the design complexity and thus the design effort required at the beginning.
• The one-meter-cubed autofac seems so pleasingly universal, like maybe once we've designed it, we could deploy it in all kinds of situations!  But I think it is a lot less universal than it looks.
  • A Baffin-Island-Plan autofac wouldn't fare well in the Sahara desert, where you'd want to manufacture solar panels (which rely more on chemistry and unique materials) instead of simple mechanical windmills that could be built almost entirely from steel.  In the sahara, you'd also have less access to iron ore in the form of exposed rock; by contrast you'd have a lot of sillica that you could use to make glass.  On the moon, you'd have no atmosphere at all for wind, and extreme temperatures + vacuum conditions would probably break a lot of the machine-shop tools (eg, liquid lubricants would freeze or sublimate).  Etc.
  • The above point isn't a fatal problem -- just having one autofac system for deserts and another for tundra would cover plenty of use cases for industrializing the unused portions of the earth.  But you'd also run into problems when you finished replicating and wanted to use all those Baffin Island autofacs to contribute back to the external, human economy.  Probably it would be fine to just have the Baffin Island autofacs build wind turbines and export steel + electricity, while the desert autofacs build solar panels and export glass + electricity.  But if you decided that you wanted your Baffin Island autofacs to start growing food, or manufacturing textiles, you would have a big problem.  The autofacs would in some ways be more flexible than a human manufacturing economy (eg, because they are doing more things "by hand", thus could switch to producing other types of steel products very quickly), but in other ways they would be much more rigid than a human manufacturing economy (if you want anything not based on steel, it might be pretty difficult for all the autofacs to reconfigure themselves).

Design effort & AI -- if AI is good enough to replace machinists, won't it be good enough to help design an autofac?

• This post reminds me of Carl Shulman's calculations (eg, on his recent 80,000 Hours podcast appearance) about the world economy's doubling times, and how fast they could possibly get, based on analogies to biological systems.
• Feynman says that, after many years, nowadays the dream of the Autofac is finally coming within reach, because AI is now good enough to operate robotics, navigate the world, use tools, and essentially replace the human machinist in a machine shop.  This seems pretty likely come true, maybe in a few years.
• But creating such a small, self-contained, simplified autofac seems like it is motivated by the desire to minimize the up-front design effort needed.  If AI ever gets good enough to become a drop-in remote worker not just for machinsts, but also for engineers/designers, then design effort is no longer such a big obstacle, and many of the conclusions flip.
• Consider how a paperclip-maximising superintelligence would colonize baffin island:
  • The first image that jumps to mind is one of automated factories tesselated across the terrain.  I think this is correct insofar as there would be lots of repetition (the basic idea of industrial production is that you can get economies of scale, cheaply churning out many copies of the same product, when you optimize a factory for producing that product).  But I don't think these would be self-replicating factories.
  • A superintelligent AI could do lots of design work very quickly, and wouldn't mind handling an extremely complex economy.  I would expect the overall complexity of the global economy to go way up, and the minimum size of a self-replicating system to stay very large (ie, nearly the size of the entire planetary economy), and we just end up shipping lots of stuff to Baffin Island.
    • If we say that the superintelligence has to start "from scratch" on Baffin Island alone, with only a limited budget for imports, then I'd expect it to start with something that looks like the 1-meter-cubed autofac, but then continually scale up in the size and complexity of its creations over time, rather than creating thousands of identical copies of one optimized design.
  • A superintelligence-run economy might actually feature much less repetition than a human industrial economy, since the AI can juggle constant design changes and iteration and customization for local conditions, rather than needing to standardize things (as humans do to allow interoperability and reduce the costs of communicating between different humans).

Okay, I will try to sum up these scattered thoughts...

1. I think that the ideal autofac design for a given situation will vary a lot based on factors like:
   1. what resources are locally available (wind vs solar, etc)
   2. how expensive it is to support humans as part of the design, vs going fully automated
   3. how much it costs to ship things to the location (the more you can ship, the bigger and more complex your autofac should be, other things equal)
   4. the ultimate scale you're aspiring to industrialize, relative to the size of your initial shipments (if you want to generate maximum energy on 1 acre of land using a 100 tons of payload, you should probably just import a 100-ton nuclear reactor and call it a day, rather than waste a bunch of money trying to design a factory to build a factory to build a nuclear reactor.  Wheras if you are trying to generate power over the entire surface of Mars with a 100 ton payload, it is much more important to first create a self-replicating industrial base before you eventually turn towards creating lots of power plants.
   5. how much it costs to design a given autofac system
      1. a larger, more complex autofac will cost more to design, but will be more efficient
      2. a more-completely-self-sufficient system (eg, including lubricant factories, or eliminating the need for humans on Baffin Island) will cost more to design, but will save on shipping costs later
      3. if you can use lots of already-existing designs, that will lower design costs (but it will increase complexity elsewhere, since now you have to manufacture all the 10,000 types of fasteners and alloys and etc used by today's random equipment designs)
      4. advanced AI might be able to help greatly reduce design costs
2. A fully-automated "autofac" design wins over a more traditional human-led industrialization effort, where the upfront costs of designing the mostly-self-sufficient autofac system manage to pay for themsleves by lowering the recurring costs of importing stuff, paying employees, etc, of a human-led industrialization effort.
3. Whoever decides to start the cool autofac startup, should probably spend a bunch of time considering these big-picture economic tradeoffs, trying to figure out what environment (baffin island, the sahara desert, the oceans, the moon, Mars, alpha centauri, etc) offers the most upside from an autofac-style approach (Baffin-Island-like tundra might indeed be the best and most practical spot), and what tradeoffs to make in terms of autofac size/complexity, how much and where to incorporate humans into the system, and etc.
   1. I would personally love to get a better sense of where the efficiencies are really coming from, that help an autofac strategy win vs a human-led industrialization strategy.  Contrast the autofac plan with a more traditional effort to have workers build roads and a few factories and erect windmills all over Baffin Island to export electricity -- where are the autofac wins coming from?  The autofac would seem to have some big disadvantages, like that its windmill blades will be made of heavy steel instead of efficient fiberglass.  Are the gains mostly from the fact that we're not paying as many worker salaries?  Or is it mostly from the fact that we're producing all our heavy materials on-site rather than having to ship them in?  Or somewhere else?

The key part of the Autofac, the part that kept it from being built before, is the AI that runs it.

That's what's doing the work here.

We can't automate machining because an AI that can control a robot arm to do typical machinist things (EG:changing cutting tool inserts, removing stringy steel-wool-like tangles of chips, etc.) doesn't exist or is not deployed.

If you have a robot arm + software solution that can do that it would massively drop operational costs which would lead to exponential growth.

The core problem is that currently we need the humans there.

To give concrete examples, a previous company where I worked had been trying to fully automate production for more than a decade. They had robotic machining cells with machine tools, parts cleaners and coordinate measuring machines to measure finished parts. Normal production was mostly automated in the sense that hands off production runs of 6+ hours were common, though particular cells might be needy and require frequent attention.

What humans had to do:

• Changing cutting tools isn't automated. An operator goes in with a screwdriver and box of carbide inserts 1-2x per shift.
• The operators do a 30-60 minute setup to get part dimensions on size after changing inserts.
  • Rough machining can zero tools outside the machine since their tolerances are larger but someone is sitting there with a T-handle wrench so the 5-10 inserts on an indexable end mill have fresh cutting edges.

Intermittent problems operators handled:

• A part isn't perfectly clean when measuring. Bad measurement leads to bad adjustment and 1-2 parts are scrap
• chips are too stringy and tangle up, clear the tangle every 15 mins
• chips are getting between a part and fixture and messing up alignment, clean intermittently and pray.

That's ignoring stupider stuff like:

• Our measurement data processing software just ate the data for a production run so we have to stop production and remeasure 100 parts.
• someone accidentally deleted some files so (same)
• We don't have the CAM done for this part scheduled to be produced so ... find something else we can run or sit idle.
• The employee running a CAM software workflow didn't double-check the tool-paths and there's a collision.

And that's before you get to maintenance issues and (arguably) design defects in the machines themselves leading to frequent breakdowns.

The vision was that a completely automated system would respond to customer orders and schedule parts to be produced with AGVs carrying parts between operations. In practice the AGVs sta there for 10+ years because even the simple things proved nearly impossible to automate completely.

Conclusion

Despite all the problems, the automated cells were more productive than manual production (robots are consistent and don't need breaks) and the company was making a lot of money. Not great automation is much much better than using manual operators.

It's hard to grasp how much everything just barely works until you've spent a year somewhere that is trying to automate. Barely works is the standard in industry AFAIK so humans are still highly necessary.

It is, in theory, possible to automate almost everything and to build reliable machines and automation. The problem is O-ring theory of economic development. If tomorrow median IQ jumps +2SD automation would rapidly start to just work as actually good solutions are put in place. As is, organizations have to fight against institutional knowledge loss (employees leaving) just to maintain competence.

This kind of thing is why I'm paying a lot of attention to Tesla these days. They seem like the likeliest candidate to close the loop first. Obsessed with robotics, vertical integration, and manufacturing automation. Emitting slogans like "the machine that makes the machine" and "the factory is the product".

I do not intend to be rude by saying this, but I firmly believe you vastly overestimate how capable modern VLMs are and how capable LLMs are at performing tasks in a list, breaking down tasks into sub-tasks, and knowing when they've completed a task. AutoGPT and equivalents have not gotten significantly more capable since they first arose a year or two ago, despite the ability for new LLMs to call functions (which they have always been able to do with the slightest in-context reasoning), and it is unlikely they will ever get better until a more linear, reward loop, agentic focused learning pipeline is developed for them and significant amount of resources are dedicated to the training of new models with a higher causal comprehension.

So now we can say "a machine shop is capable of manufacturing itself from steel and a copy of its electronics, given enough time."

I think you're underestimating the complexity of inputs to a modern machine shop. For example, they need tool bits that can drill/mill steel; these don't last forever and are a major cost.

Macroscopic self-replicators are extremely powerful, and provide much of the power of nanotech without relying on nanotech. Seems like they might be worth mentioning more often as a rhetorical tool against those who dismiss anyone who mentions nanotechnology. 

Back when I read about people claiming a RepRap can reproduce itself, I felt like the claim implied it would build the electronics of the new RepRap from scratch as well and was confused since obviously a 3D printer can't double as a chip fab. The gold standard for a self-replicating machine for me is something like plants, which can turn high-entropy raw materials like soil and ores into itself given a source of energy. I guess you could talk about autotrophic self-reproducing machines that can do their thing given a barren planet and sunlight, and heterotrophic self-reproducing machines that have selling machined components over the internet and using the income to buy CPU chips and hire workers to assemble the skeleton of a new automated workshop as a valid strategy.

I would love to see someone actually do this.

1. It might get people take the idea of self-replicating AI seriously
2. The abundance provided by something like this might convince people that they actually don't need to AGI to solve all of the worlds issues

Just out of curiousity, how many of those tools have you personally run? How many have you built and/or maintained?

How much of a loss of precision would we expect in one generation of autofacs?

As a concrete example, let's say one of the components of an autofac is a 0.03125 inch (±0.1 thousandths) CNC drill bit. Can your autofac make another such drill bit out of the same material and at the same level of precision?

If not, maybe we have to ship in the drill bits as well. But there are a large number of things like this, and at some point you've got a box that can assemble copies of itself from prefabricated parts, but uses a pretty standard supply chain to obtain those prefabricated parts. Which, to be clear, would still be pretty cool.

This has parallels with how the factory-building game Factorio presents things. The thing that makes Factorio fun^[1] is how it abstracts away those pesky prohibitively complex nuances of manufacturing & automation so that everything can feasibly be automated quickly and scaled ad infinitum. For example: 

• The conveyor belts run on magic (they don't require any power, which isn't really explained considering every other electrical thing in the game requires pseudo-realistic levels of electrical input.)
• The assembling machines (essentially Autofacs) don't require any retooling/tuning/cleaning/etc to switch between completely different recipes seamlessly)
• No manufacturing equipment ever wears out or needs physical maintenance.
• Inserters (robot hands that handle objects to and from conveyor belts and the various structures) detect objects flawlessly and reliably and any kind can handle any type of object (and furthermore object sizes are abstracted such that all take the same amount of space on a conveyor belt)
• Electrical usage is abstracted so that you only need to keep generated power >= usage or things will start to slow down/get rolling blackouts. You don't need to worry about pesky throughput tolerances on cables, one small wooden power pole and its wire can handle just as much as a giant cross-country steel behemoth.
• & thousands of other small details abstracted away for simplicity.

Overall I hope we are able to progress to Autofacs in real life, I just don't see it being nearly as straightforward as any of us would prefer. Not that I want to discourage anyone from making the attempt! I just hope that they know what they are getting into.

1. ^{^}

   Really really fun for engineering-minded people like myself. 
   Fun-hazard level — If you've never tried it before it might be wise not to unless you have incredible self discipline or several days of free time in the near future; It can be addicting.

You could build one windmill per Autofac, but the power available from a windmill scales as the fifth power of the height, so it probably makes sense for a group of Autofacs to build one giant windmill to serve them all.

The swept area of a wind turbine scales as the second power of the height (assuming constant aspect ratios), and the velocity of wind increases with ~1/7 power with height. Since the power goes with the third power of the velocity, that means overall power ~height^2.4. The problem is that the amount of material required scales roughly with the 3rd power of the height. This would be exactly the case with constant aspect ratios. The actual case and the scale up of wind turbines over the last few decades has not scaled that fast, partly because of higher strength materials and partly because of optimization. Anyway, I agree there are economies of scale from micro wind turbines, but they aren't that large from a material perspective (mostly driven by labour savings).

If I did not see a section in your bio about being an engineer who has worked in multiple relevant areas, I would dismiss this post as a fantasy from someone who does not appreciate how hard building stuff is; a "big picture guy" who does not realise that imagining the robot is dramatically easier than designing and building one which works. 

Given that you know you are not the first person to imagine this kind of machine, or even the first with a rough plan to build one, why do you think that your plan has a greater chance of success than other individuals or groups which have tried before you? Is there something specific that you bring to the table that means you will avoid the challenges or be more suited to tackle them?

I think you might do better starting out with creating a machine which can assemble a copy of itself, from pre-built off-the-shelf parts. A robot arm and camera attachment, which is capable of recognising the pre-made parts of itself and fitting them together autonomously would be very challenging to make and would be a good proof of concept for the larger project. 

If you have this system working, then your next step would be creating the same machine but including a 3d print bed (which it is also capable of assembling) or small scale milling machine to build a few of the parts, and continue by adding more and more manufacturing capabilities, so you have to supply fewer parts with each iteration of the design. I remember assembling my 3d printer a few years ago, and there were quite a lot of steps which would be major practical challenges to a robot a similar size to the printer, even in just assembling the pre-made parts.

I'm glad you wrote this, it adds some interesting context that was unfamiliar to me for this market I opened around a week ago: https://manifold.markets/dogway/which-is-the-earliest-year-well-hav#wji33pv4fcj

I was entertaining the possibility of a powder or fluid-based metal as an input to a 3D printer which works today for fabricating metal components and seems likely to improve significantly with time. I was considering this avenue to be the most likely way that the threshold of full fidelity-preserving self-reproduction is passed, but I have no expertise in this area. It seems like the 3D printing path, if viable, would alleviate the need for some of the tools in the Autofac setup and might reduce reproduction time considerably.

Because most of the software runs in a data center remote from the Autofac, it can be shared between Autofacs.  This allows it to not have to think very hard when things are boring, and very hard when something goes wrong.

"most", but not all.  How does the Autofac generate the control system for the next Autofac?  Doesn't this require a chip fab, or are we just hand waving away the need for more processors and just saying we will import them from outside like we do the raw materials?

I'm not quite sure how much of an AI is needed here. Current 3d printing uses no AI and barely a feedback loop. It just mechanistically does a long sequence of preprogrammed actions. 

Some notes on self-replicating machines: Complexity/precision: The dexterity required to move a few wires into a crude machine is far in excess of the dexterity of that crude machine. Generally, designing something which can produce itself is complex for that reason, the relationship between complexity and ability to create complex things is nonlinear, difficult to affect in useful ways, and hard to measure without creating real test objects. Very complex objects(like organisms) can assemble ‘copies’ of themselves, through complex and error prone processes.

Have you heard of Neil Gershenfeld?

The smallest technological system capable of physical self-reproduction is the entire economy.

Going from this to a 1M cube is a big jump. This comment is the basis for the enthusiasm for space colonies etc. E.g. SpaceX says 1 million people are needed, vs 1M cube, huge uncertainty in the scale of the difference. To me, almost all the difficulty is in the inputs, especially electronics.

A few comments:

1. I think you would get significantly less push-back if you kept the autofac at human-scale. Have you considered a standard-sized shipping container as the form factor for the autofac?
2. A discussion of nanotech is conspicuously missing. Some challenges get easier when you consider working with matter a the scale of quantized matter (atoms). Would let you fully close the loop on feedstock vitamins too.
3. The AI angle seems to be hand-waving away many of the control challenges, but I admit I can't quite articulate what the core challenges are right now.

I think you're missing a few parts. The Autofac (as specified) cannot reproduce the chips and circuit boards required for the AI, the cameras' lenses and sensors, or the robot's sensors and motor controllers. I don't think this is an insurmountable hurdle: a low-tech (not cutting-edge) set of chips and discrete components would serve well enough for a stationary computer. Similarly, high-res sensors are not required. (Take it slow and replace physical resolution with temporal resolution and multiple samples.)

Second, the reproduced Autofacs should be built on movable platforms so different groups can get their own. (Someone comes with a truck and a few forklifts, lifts the platform onto the truck, and drives the Autofac to the new location.)

I really like this idea, especially the part about doing it on Baffin Island. A few questions/comments/concerns

1. During the winter, the polar ice cap expands to the point that Baffin Island is surrounded by ice. This makes shipping things to and from the island difficult for a large part of the year. I also imagine most people don't want to be there during the winter to check up on things. Do you imagine things progressing more slowly during the winter because of this?
2. Looking at the climate data for Baffin island and comparing mean daily maximum in July and mean daily minimum in January, it looks like there's a range of about 40 Celsius, which seems significant (and over a range pretty different from what most engineers are used to building for). Do you expect this will interfere with the equipment? Will the Autofacs need some kind of temperature control?
3. Do you have any ideas for how to deal with defective/broken AutoFacs? My first thought is that you could automatically disassemble them, throw away the defective parts and use the working parts to build new Autofacs. There's probably something more clever.
4. Will the AutoFacs be able to clean themselves or fix the other normal, small things that worsen performance as machinery operates? If so, how?