Re: No nanotech before AI

From: Steven K. Graham (skg@sunflower.com)
Date: Thu Jul 13 2000 - 15:54:03 MDT


At 11:56 AM -0700 7/13/00, hal@finney.org wrote:
>Robin writes:
>> It seems far from clear to me that it is trivial to take a design for a
>>bridge,
>> throw some nanodust at it and say "Build it for me over there." Assembly
>> and construction use intelligence, just as design does.
>
>I've never constructed anything more complex than a dog house, but it
>is true that most construction projects are challenging, even with a
>design that looks good on paper.
>
>However I think the reasons are mostly due to imperfections in the
>environment where the constructed object has to fit in, imperfections
>in the building materials, and imperfections in my construction technique.
>
>With nanotech we might be able to eliminate the last two sources of error.
>If all parts are perfect and all assembly steps are done with atomic scale
>precision, there should be no need for intelligence. Parts are attached
>or detached by rote, with a check to see if it went right, and (perhaps)
>discarded if there was a flaw. This would not take much intelligence.

Hi, all. I'm new to the list but intrigued by the discussions. The
particular bit preceding caught my eye, and caused me to wonder whether
anyone had attempted a macro-level analog -- what comes to mind would be
assemblers/disassemblers for lego structures.

Has anyone ever tried to build a machine which could take a lego object,
and build a copy? Or duplicate an object in any similarly constrained
design/manufacturing environment?

cheers,
skg



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