Self-Replicating Factories: Macro to Nano 14
Christopher Thomas writes "A common theme in science fiction is the "replicator"; a device that can build anything on demand. An extension of this idea is the self-replicating factory, that grows in size geometrically to produce goods or to terraform hostile environments. It turns out that both of these miraculous devices are closer than they seem - in fact, to some extent they're already here. I've posted an article summarizing things."
Beam Me Up (Score:1)
Re: Self-Replicating Factories (Score:1)
Re:growth rates (Score:1)
"Exponential" is a type of "Geometric", and is usually used as a synonym.
From dictionary.com:
Geometrical progression, a progression in which the terms increase or decrease by equal ratios, as the numbers [lbrace2]2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 6464, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2[rbrace2] by a continual multiplication or division by 2.
(Their typos, not mine.)
This Article Was Totally Worthless (Score:2)
Energy for nanotech (Score:2)
Self-Replication (Score:2)
All self-replicating factories need to become viable is the creation of one nano-machine which can handcraft molecules, atom by atom, to a given design. It becomes self-replicating when it's fed it's own design.
There are only three catches once that is achieved;
(1) Information - once you have the tools to create an object, atom by atom, you still need to know which atoms and where. A lump of iron would be reasonably easy - or any simple crystalline structure. However, making a transplant organ by order would require a tremendous amount of information.
(2) Control - that which make nano-machines useful also makes them difficult to regulate. Their size would make them vulnerable to 'mutation' by environmental interaction (getting whacked by an errant atom/photon) and their multiplicity coupled with their ability to replicate would cause them to evolve quickly. Evolution would tend to make them selfish (if they replicate at X speed while fabricating a car, how much faster would they replicate if they didn't bother with the car?) and select for the ones which can evade whatever 'fidelity checks' were implemented.
(3) What do we do with all the out of work people? The physical sciences are already hundreds of years ahead of the social sciences, if the pace of development is accelerated yet further for the 'hard' sciences then the gulf could well become catastrophic. Many people define themselves by their work, if it's removed from them then the majority of the population could spend it's days watching TV and posting slashdot.
Marios
Re:Clarifications. (Score:1)
Technology is only partly about gradual progression - most movement comes in leaps and starts (as, it seems, with evolution - punctuated equilibrium etc.). I don't think we will see 'mundane universal fabricators' before we have nanotech. We are already composed of 'microtech' machines - enzymes. As such, genetic engineering (such as is occurring now) offers us a shortcut to the direct manipulation of molecules.
Automation can come in two ways - bottom-up, as in nanotechnology, and top-down, as in artificial intelligence. If robots with the capacity to self-learn and make their own tools are created, then factories can become fully automated without great change.
I suspect that the relevant technologies will appear after a few key breakthroughs and mature overnight (something like a decade) and will bypass the intermediate stages of milli- and micro-machines.
Equally, they could be superseded, to a degree, by the appearance of effective AI.
By the way, energy supply isn't really a concern for nano-machines - about half of the necessary manipulations would be exothermic and it would be easy enough to gain energy by breaking down or bonding atoms and molecules (in much the way enzymes do, but more flexibly).
Marios
Clarifications. (Score:3)
95% of the article describes the interesting things that will happen as ordinary technology advances, and attempts to show a likely path it will take. The nanotech paragraphs were just added for the sake of completeness (as I'd already been talking about microtech). They are largely irrelevant to the article.
As it seems to have been missed my post people: The purpose of the article is to point out a _probable_ path that manufacturing technology will take in the near future, and examine its corollaries. I posted it because a) the corollaries are interesting, and b) most people don't think about the fact that mundane universal fabricators will exist long before nanotech ones.
I hope this clears up a few things.
And Hemos, why is this not showing up on the main page? I had to do a search to turn it up at all.
I don't see it... (Score:2)
Look at present-day factories: they're getting bigger as they automate, not smaller. While I'll admit there are a few areas where micro-level "replication" might work (things on the order of the highly-modified inkjet printers now being used to manufacture polymer electronics... experimentally), it's hard to see how that scale of device would manufacture other than specialty items; the raw materials don't exist in the right forms to do generalized manufacture, for one -- even if the same general mix of elements can make both food and clothing, micro-scale fabrication relies on very specific compounds, not generic building blocks. And forget about anything at a larger-than-micro scale, since the problems only get worse.
Nanoscale manufacturing, on the other hand, conceptually takes just the raw elements and builds up from there. Anything larger requires increasing numbers of preformed, more highly modified "raw" materials: either the actual machine doing the fab work is small, with a huge (and very task-specific) materials supply (and large factories to produce that), or the machine is very large and does all the preliminary work on the materials itself. There's nothing in between.
As I good example of what I'm talking about, consider books: you can make them in a couple of ways, either with a fairly large printing plant which manufactures all sorts of books at low cost, or by using a laser printer to roll your own. The plant buys materials in bulk and does significant modifications on them in the process of making books -- and the more cost-efficient it is, the "rawer" the materials (right up to vertical businesses which make their own paper and ink, in the end). You, on the other hand, buy precut paper and toner cartridges, and staple the output together -- and still have a significantly different product, which occupies only one tiny corner of the "product space" of the printing plant's possible output. And the more complexity you want to add, the larger the number of specialized toner cartridges and home-office binding machines you have to buy -- each of which is task-specific.
Sure, we've got much more power with individual, cheap machines at our fingertips -- but they don't generalize their capabilities, they only get more task-specific. And this trend won't stop until we hit low-cost nanoscale technology, if even then.
While it's a compelling fantasy, I don't think it's a probable path at all.
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growth rates (Score:1)
This is high school math here folks. :)
Re:Energy for nanotech (Score:1)
Re:This Article Was Totally Worthless (Score:2)
(Drexler gets hand-wavy too, sometimes, but at least he seems to be clearer on the inherent uncertainty.)
Drexler (Score:1)
And read Stephenson's The Diamond Age, while you're at it, for a pretty good SF treatment of nanotech.
Re:Clarifications. (Score:1)