Comment by Ben28 (ben-q) on It's time for a self-reproducing machine · 2024-08-08T20:04:33.478Z · LW · GW

Isn't the US a bit too dependent on "Vitamin Xi" and "Vitamin T[aiwan]" (I amuse myself) for the electronics for these naive estimates based on the U.S. economy to work out too well? We'd have to find a way to carve out a part of the global economy that is basically self sufficient and very plausibly reproducible i.e. able to replace all critical aspects of itself once they run out their lifetimes without a substantial degradation of technology, and I can only imagine a claim of a self-reproducing subsection of (or just the entire) global economy to be very controversial due to predictions of a collapse or massive change to globalization, breakdown in U.S.-China trade relations, an invasion of Taiwan, worries of economic, societal and technological collapse, etc.