I, Nanobot — Bionanotechnology is Coming

Maria Williams writes "Alan H. Goldstein, inventor of the A-PRIZE, and popular science columnist, says: Scientists are on the verge of breaking the carbon barrier — creating artificial life and changing forever what it means to be human. And we're not ready... Nanofabricated animats may be infinitesimally tiny, but their electrons will be exactly the same size as ours — and their effect on human reality will be as immeasurable as the universe. Like an inverted SETI program, humanity must now look inward, constantly scanning technology space for animats, or their progenitors. The first alien life may not come from the stars, but from ourselves." Yes it's an older article, but it's a fairly quiet sunday today.

Comments

Guys like you need to "emerge" from Ai.

[Lazerf4rt]

Life will almost certainly arise from Ai (Ai=artificial intelligence).

I'm tired of the fact that intelligent people, such as yourself, continue to dream up these lame prophecies of Ai's "coming to life". Naturally, I assume you are a big fan of Isaac Asimov or Vernor Vinge.

You guys blather on about how a bunch of abstractions processed in a computer could result in life. But can you not see that life happens in reality, before the abstraction process even takes place?

Life creates the very abstractions you are thinking about. You create them, when you think them. Abstractions don't create you, and abstractions don't create life.

The real question is, why, then, is an intelligent person like yourself so convinced that they could, even offering predictions of exactly how it will happen? The simple answer is that you are a computer programmer with an ego to feed. That's all there is to it.

Pardon my bluntness, but this is the only reply which is telling you the truth. All the other replies are from other programmers with their own egos to feed. They just want to argue with your set of predictions because it clashes with their own. It never goes anywhere and, in fact, it never can.