US robot builds copies of itself
crossposted from my accidental blog I can't believe it's a blog"
By Roland Pease
BBC science correspondent
US researchers have devised a simple robot that can make copies of itself from spare parts.
Writing in Nature, the robot's creators say their experiment shows the ability to reproduce is not unique to biology.
Their long-term plan is to design robots made from hundreds or thousands of identical basic modules.
These could repair themselves if parts fail, reconfigure themselves to better perform the task they have been set, or even to make extra helpers.
If you've ever read the Dune Prequels, especially "The Battle of Corrin", then you'll know why I say "cool, but...".
He's the reader's digest version of the relevant part of that book: in this story humans are fighting for survival against "thinking machines", i.e., AI robots bent on exterminating and/or enslaving humanity. At this stage of the fight humanity has bottled up the remaining thinking machines on the planet Corrin. It's a standoff because of the equal balance of military power. Towards the end of the novel, the thinking machines, as one of their final attempts to attack free humanity, launches probes that contain little self-replicating, weaponized robots that act as buzzsaws (much like the things in the Philip K. Dick story Second Variety, which became the basis for the movie Screamers.
Now, as described in the BBC story, this new technology is a long way from becoming little buzz-saws, but given time, I have no doubt that it will get there.
I believe that mankind has the capacity to create or accomplish anything that we can dream up in our little noggins -- including all of the stuff that appears in Sci-Fi stories. That said, we also have the capacity to monumentally fuck up everything that we touch. This technology, upon further refinement (as found in the Dune novel I reference above), could become absolutely terrible when (not if) some wacko like, oh, Donald Rumsfeld, finds a military application for it.
That said, this technology clearly has awesome potential for good. The fact that it exists gives us yet another reason to make sure that people like Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Frist, etc... are run out of politics for good, because if they get ahold of this, you know it will be used to cause harm to people.