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Towards Self-Replicating Rapid Prototypers
Neil Halelamien writes "Researchers at the University of Bath are developing a rapid prototyping machine capable of making copies of itself and other products, reminiscent of the Universal Constructor proposed by von Neumann. The so-called Replicating Rapid-Prototyper (or RepRap) would produce items from raw materials and small components like microchips. If successful, this could make rapid prototyping cheap enough for regular in-home usage, especially since the project's lead, Dr. Adrian Bowyer, will be releasing his project's designs under the GNU GPL. It's previously been proposed that a similar system would be useful for space exploration and industrialization."
Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, I have always been interested in applying evolution to computer chips - the randomness and efficiency of evolution is going to find better ways of doing things than our current methods, and is also just damn cool to know your computer chip is analogous to a living 'species'.
A rapid prototyping machine that can reproduce itself is a kind of holy grail. When we get that, we have something that can bootstrap itself. This would be the Santa Claus machine that we have long dreamed of. One of the major proponents of this has been Don Lancaster. His site is the link below.
www.tinaja.com/santa01.html
Once everyone has a machine in their basement, the economy of the world will be turned on its ear. Consumer goods will cost only the price of their materials. The cheap labor advantage of India and China will vanish. The nature of products will change. Right now, it makes no sense to make something repairable. It is cheaper to build something that can't be fixed and throw it away. When we get very distributed manufacturing however, things will be built with only one or two raw materials. Things will be built so they are easy to assemble. It would make sense to build a new heating element for your coffee pot. Waste would go down. Recycling would become much more immediate and local. People would share designs the way we now share open source software. Quite a different world would result.
And this just after Bruce Schnier posted a link to a how-to for destroying the Earth, which includes blackholes and von Neumann machines as methods.
While the idea of a 3D printer cheap enough for personal use /is/ going to revolutionize the world by making certain real items as cheap as software, the part about it being a von Neumann machine is overrated. The article just mentions it in passing and there is no evidence that he's actually figured out how to do that. That's been one of the holy grails of engineering since it was proposed. The article doesn't mention whether the materials used will be recyclable. Since everyone and their grandmother will start spitting out objects if they have this and since it would probably be cheaper to build a new object rather than repairing an old one, mass use of UCs will produce tons of waste. Imagine if you could never delete any file on your computer but could create more easily. You would run out of space very quickly.
BTW, for a good book on the social implications of cheap universal constructors, I suggest the Stephenson's book Diamond Age.
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Wired article as proof
As molecular manufacturing(1) matures, I'd venture to guess that the new artificial scarcity cartels that emerge will be MUCH nastier. Something scary, like the MANWO (Manufacturers Association of the New World Order) :-)
Right now the means of digital [re]production is available to all, and it's got a few copyright-extending control-freaks pissed about losing their empire. When you get to thinking about the implications of the means of physical [re]production being democratized, then you start getting dizzy wondering how society and the scarcity-based trade economy will reorganize itself (hopefully without much chaos).
((1)Note that this ultimate goal is now called "molecular manufacturing", since the previous general term of "nanotechology" has been co-opted by buzzword PR people to mean whatever they want it to mean.)
Power to the Peaceful
I recall reading in my middle-school years (aka junior high) a rather unique story about replicating robots. The story was written in the 1960s-1970s
Essentially, the premise is that a meteor falls out of the sky one night, where it is observed by a few people. When they arive at the site, it is bustling with miniature robots. They call the government, and the gov shows up to observe, but by then the robots have built little buildings. Some robots are strip-mining, and they eventually build a little refinery, then more robots, then a bigger refinery... and a launch pad. By the end of the story (and by the time anyone realized they were in danger), the robots had built themselves little rockets, and were now shooting their seeds of new robot colonies around the country, soon to dominate the world, totally dispassionate for whatever was there to begin with... it just wasn't in their programming.
To boil the story down, some long forgotten alien race had created the ultimate automated factory, traveling from star system to star system to collect rare materials, and ship it back for the long ride home at sub-light speeds. Its a self propagating system, that as they spread from system to system, asteroid to moon to planet, the geometric growth would provide their civilization every material they would ever need...