Slashdot Mirror
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."
Black holes mentioned earlier, now self-replicating robots. We're screwed.
This will be GPL'd. I don't know how the copyright cartels would react if a machine could make illegal copies of itself.
What?
If the good doctor were to suddenly die in the next four years, I'd start lining my baseball caps.
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.
All this was done in a very crude way, as if they were developing a process for home use. Their metal casting technique is scary. They used "Wood's Metal", which is a solder-like alloy of tin, lead, cadmium, and bismuth. All of which are toxic. Lead and cadmium cause heavy-metal poisoning, and the body won't clear either of them. No serious precautions seem to have been taken against inhalation - they just used gloves. At one point they tried powdered metal, which is much more of an inhalation hazard than molten liquid. They need to run their people through the usual checks for heavy-metal poisoning.
There are rapid prototyping machines that deposit metal, and that's probably a more useful direction.
All this is a long, long way from self-replication.
Actually what you really want to do is to build a set of evolving self-assembling robots that get their parts by disassembling other robots. That way there is evolutionary pressure to evolve faster and faster self-assemblers.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.