"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" wrote:
> And, leaving aside the power issue, let's not forget that waste heat is
> perhaps the single greatest limiting factor for medical nanobots and
> anything else operating in a living environment. Attack bots have no
> moral problem with dumping kilowatts of waste heat into the environment;
> defense shields may find it futile to defend a leaf if effective defense
> means setting the leaf on fire.
Actually, I think most of the calculations on power dissipation for
replication and operation are largely bogus. It's much too early for
anything definite. I don't see why we can't
develop something with an energetic footprint of biological life or
better. Your brain burns 15-20 W, a bee brain about a microwatt. You
don't have to build anything peu a peu, there's controlled polymerisation
and self-assembly.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:18 MDT