The nanoassembler as Shmoo 2.0

After the world of literacy opened up to me in the mid 1960's, I read the daily comic strips in Tulsa's newspaper voraciously, including Al Capp's Li'l Abner during its latter years of publication. I remember a story line in Li'l Abner where some seedy politician gave a press conference, and to every question from a reporter about an issue vexing the American people in the late 1960's, the politician gave the answer "Shmoos," then explained how these creatures called shmoos could solve the problem.

Capp introduced the shmoo characters in 1948. Wikipedia's article about the shmoo says the following:

A shmoo is shaped like a plump bowling pin with legs. It has smooth skin, eyebrows and sparse whiskers—but no arms, nose or ears. Its feet are short and round but dexterous, as the shmoo's comic book adventures make clear. It has a rich gamut of facial expressions, and often expresses love by exuding hearts over its head.

Cartoonist Al Capp ascribed to the shmoo the following curious characteristics. His satirical intent should be evident:

* They reproduce asexually and are very prolific. They require no sustenance other than air.
* Naturally gentle, they require minimal care, and are ideal playmates for young children.
* Shmoos are delicious to eat, and are eager to be eaten. If a human looks at one hungrily, it will happily immolate itself itself, either by jumping into a frying pan, after which they taste like chicken, or into a broiling pan, after which they taste like steak. When roasted they taste like pork, and when baked they taste like catfish. (Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell.)
* They also produce eggs (neatly packaged), milk (bottled, grade-A), and butter—no churning required. Their pelts make perfect bootleather or house timber, depending on how thick you slice it.
* They have no bones, so there's absolutely no waste. Their eyes make the best suspender buttons, and their whiskers make perfect toothpicks. In short, they are simply the perfect ideal of a subsistence agricultural herd animal.
* The frolicking of shmoon is so entertaining (such as their staged "shmoosical comedies") that people no longer feel the need to watch television or go to the movies.
* Some of the more tasty varieties of shmoo are more difficult to catch. Usually shmoo hunters, now a sport in some parts of the country, utilize a paper bag, flashlight and stick to capture their shmoos. At night the light stuns them, then they can be whacked in the head with the stick and put in the bag for frying up later on.

Apparently Capp invented the shmoo as a modern version of the Cockaigne myth, but he did it ambiguously so that his readers came up with different interpretations of its allegorical meaning. Does the shmoo represent the potentials of post-Depression and post-War 20th Century American capitalism? or the promises of liberal politicians who wanted to build upon the New Deal? or the aspirations of Soviet Communism, which likewise promised abundance? or something else entirely? I doubt Capp knew about cargo cults in the South Pacific when he imagined the shmoo, but his idea appeals to that sort of thinking.

You can probably see where I want to go with this. Eric Drexler rebranded the shmoo, but without Capp's cleverness and sense of humor, when he introduced the world to his idea of the "nanoassembler" in the 1980's, or just "assembler" for short. He even calls assemblers "engines of abundance" in his popular book:

Assemblers will be able to make virtually anything from common materials without labor, replacing smoking factories with systems as clean as forests. They will transform technology and the economy at their roots, opening a new world of possibilities. They will indeed be engines of abundance.

In other words, Drexler thought the shmoo didn't do quite enough for mankind. For example, as far as I know, Capp didn't attribute to the shmoo the ability to produce industrial goods like computers, space ships or machines to revive people in cryonic suspension. So Drexler imagined a kind of trans-shmoo, or Shmoo 2.0, with the power to work these sorts of miracles, "without labor," and without pollution.

Framing the nanoassembler idea in this way shows how ridiculous it sounds. I can see why blogger Scott Locklin mocks it as a fantasy about having "genie-like superpowers."

As a personal note, reading Li'l Abner's stories about its fictional hillbilly community of Dogpatch made me a little uncomfortable because I knew that I had Dogpatch-like people in my family. My mother told me stories about her life as the child of migrant laborers from Arkansas who traveled to the state of Washington in the 1940's and worked on an apple orchard, much like the characters in The Grapes of Wrath. In 1972 she showed me the ramshackle house of her birth in the Ozark town of St. Paul, Arkansas. Its remains leaned against a tree when I saw it, making it unusable; and it has probably long since disappeared. But in its prime it would have looked just like the real estate in Dogpatch. On top of that, mom's birthplace lay near a creek called Dog Branch, so I teased her about the resemblance of the names.