I’m not sure—I only worked in a pretty narrow range of the manufacturing / engineering space, and I know there’s a ton of domains out there that I’m not familiar with.
I’m also don’t think most of the problems are conceptual in the first place. As Elon Musk likes to say, making a working prototype is easy, and manufacturing at scale is at least 10-100x harder. Although maybe conceptual work would be required for building self replicating machines that only take raw material as input. I would typically think about robots achieving self replication by just building more robot factories. It seems pretty challenging for a self replicating machine to produce microchips or actuators from raw material, but maybe there’s a way to get around this.
Oops I think I’m using the wrong terminology because I’m not familiar with the industry.
When I say self replicating machine, I am referring to a robot factory. Maybe “self replicating factory” would be a better description.
Biological cells (which self reproduce) are less like machines and more like factories, and the incredible world of complex proteins inside a cell are like the sea of machines inside a factory.
I think a robot factory which doesn’t need human input, can operate at a scale somewhere between human factories and biological cells, and potentially self replicate far faster than the human economy (20 years), but slower than a biological cell (20 minutes or 0.00004 years).
Smaller machines operate faster. An object 1,000,000 times smaller, is 1,000,000 times quicker to move a bodylength at the same speed/energy density, or 10,000 quicker at the same power density, or 1000 times quicker at the same acceleration. It can endure 1,000,000 times more acceleration with the same damage. (Bending/cutting is still 1 times the speed at the same power density, but our economy would grow many times faster if that became the only bottleneck)
I’m not sure—I only worked in a pretty narrow range of the manufacturing / engineering space, and I know there’s a ton of domains out there that I’m not familiar with.
I’m also don’t think most of the problems are conceptual in the first place. As Elon Musk likes to say, making a working prototype is easy, and manufacturing at scale is at least 10-100x harder. Although maybe conceptual work would be required for building self replicating machines that only take raw material as input. I would typically think about robots achieving self replication by just building more robot factories. It seems pretty challenging for a self replicating machine to produce microchips or actuators from raw material, but maybe there’s a way to get around this.
Oops I think I’m using the wrong terminology because I’m not familiar with the industry.
When I say self replicating machine, I am referring to a robot factory. Maybe “self replicating factory” would be a better description.
Biological cells (which self reproduce) are less like machines and more like factories, and the incredible world of complex proteins inside a cell are like the sea of machines inside a factory.
I think a robot factory which doesn’t need human input, can operate at a scale somewhere between human factories and biological cells, and potentially self replicate far faster than the human economy (20 years), but slower than a biological cell (20 minutes or 0.00004 years).
Smaller machines operate faster. An object 1,000,000 times smaller, is 1,000,000 times quicker to move a bodylength at the same speed/energy density, or 10,000 quicker at the same power density, or 1000 times quicker at the same acceleration. It can endure 1,000,000 times more acceleration with the same damage. (Bending/cutting is still 1 times the speed at the same power density, but our economy would grow many times faster if that became the only bottleneck)