Tradeoffs of pathways

From Wise Nano

This page is for discussion of which bootstrapping pathway or pathways are "better" to work on. There will be no single answer. Criteria include, but are not limited to:

Time and effort required
Spinoffs and fundability
Benefits vs. risks: what are the implications of this pathway?

Polymer

Polymer-based molecular manufacturing can be expected to produce relatively low-performance products and manufacturing systems. However, they will still be useful in several important contexts.

Medical: Large arrays of sub-cellular sensors; actuators of ~biological power for surgery/treatment.
Computers: Arrays of logic, assuming the building blocks can be made electronically active; should be quite competitive with silicon.
Further research: Actuated machines that can control chemical reactions can probably be made to do more reactions than necessary to just build more of themselves; the programmable structures and/or machinery produced by any technology in this family would probably speed the development of higher-performance molecular manufacturing.
Proof of principle: It's still widely believed that machines will have a very hard time building duplicates of themselves. This causes irrational refusal to consider the implications of exponential manufacturing. An externally controlled machine would be perfectly safe from running amok, but would serve as a valuable wake-up call.

Diamondoid

Development:

Requires high-vacuum environment (probably), high-precision machinery, development of new fields of chemistry
Probably requires a lot of work to get to the point where a self-contained manufacturing system can work reliably with just a stream of instructions and simple chemicals
Not a lot of obvious spinoffs before that point
May be political problems with development, due to opposition from chemists and spurious but widespread association with "gray goo"

Implications:Benefits: