The consequences of assembler-based manufacturing will be enormous in areas as diverse as computation, medicine, and the environment. Because they will be able to copy themselves, assemblers will be inexpensive. By working in large teams, assemblers and more specialized nanomachines will be able to build objects cheaply. By ensuring that each atom is properly placed, they will manufacture products of high quality and reliability. Left-over molecules would be subject to this strict control as well, making the manufacturing process extremely clean.
Radiation can break bonds and misarrange atoms within a device.
Without such precautions, molecular machines would eventually break down and stop working. Assembler-based manufacturing will enable the construction of extremely small computers. The equivalent of a modern mainframe computer could fit into a cubic micron, a volume far smaller than that of a single human cell. Once such nanocomputers have been designed and the technology is in hand, building them will be inexpensive, enabling us to use many of them at once. A laptop computer could then have more power than all the computers in the world today put together.