> It's really cool to hear a public figure seriously talk about self-replicating machines. To me this is the key to unlocking human potential and ending material scarcity.
You are a self-replicating machine running on top of a massive web of other self replicating machines. You are fundamentally constrained by the energy and materials available to you, as is your entire operating stack. You are a petal on a fractal flower whose growth, already exponential, threatens to crack its pot.
Incidentally, crackpot would be a good way to describe these sorts of pieces, if the person writing them did not so obviously benefit from writing them.
The industrial revolution brought about the development of fabulous innovations like the mass production of standardized and interchangeable parts which has been instrumental in achieving the level of economic production, scientific advancement and quality of life that we enjoy.
But I think that there are limitations on these kinds of techniques and we can see them with the changing economics of our most advanced technologies -- semiconductors. Improvements have slowed, capital investments have increased and cost per transistor have plateaued and are now starting to rise.
At the same time the way that we extract energy from our environment is not sustainable and is causing great imbalances in our atmosphere which are having cascading effects on the environment and this is all due to the fact that our energy systems are not closed loop.
If we're going to take manufacturing and industry as a whole to the next level just like the industrial revolution did we're going to need to take cues from biology. The next manufacturing revolution will be a merger of the ideas from the industrial revolution, the digital revolution and biological systems like the ones you describe above.
Self replicating systems that can heal, source their parts from the environment around them, and that can scale exponentially through processes akin to cellular division are inevitable.
They will allow us to offload the burden of mineral extraction and refining to the moon and asteroids, and will allow us to massively scale up the production of products on scales previously unimaginable and of goods full of elements like platinum or gold we consider obscenely expensive due to their relative rarity on Earth.
You assume there are enough trees on the desertic island to build the ship that will allow us to reach the brave new world full of resources.
We don't know that. It seems to be a leap of faith, based on the possibility of numerous successive achievements (IA, then fusion, then robots, then interplanetary mining, etc.) where each new step is always reachable. Like in a video game.
Maybe the necessary amount of oil (or whatever) required to reach the next key milestone towards unlimited resources has never existed. Maybe it'd have required 1 billion more years before humankind reached the industrial age.
Maybe the trees on our island are just enough to build a raft, not a brig, and we should have used them to build a shelter and make the inevitable end more comfortable.
We have no shortage of energy or matter in the solar system to accomplish these goals.
To unlock these resources we need to turn to self replicating machines that can stand up lunar and asteroid mining to build sufficient orbital manufacturing capacity.
You completely ignore the point of my metaphor. Do you have enough trees to build the brig to reach these resources?
If we deplete our oil stocks (even non-conventional) before discovering the multiple replacements we'd need at large scale for logistics, electronics, hardware, healthcare, heavy vehicles and tools, etc. we won't get anywhere close your solar system matter. Maybe we should have rationed it 70 years ago, to give us more time to research the next breakthrough, instead of investing in all the modern life shenanigans like buying dozens of $5 pieces of clothes from Shein or Temu because it make us feel good in the schoolyard or on Instagram. The "trust the science bro, if it's possible we'll make it, let the human genius do its thing" is dangerous.
Yes there are sufficient hydrocarbon reserves on Earth to do this. There's also sufficient energy sources from a combination of solar, wind, and geothermal.
* 1/3 of the food that we produce is completely wasted.
* 43% of the world's population is overweight and 16% is obese.
* Livestock uses 77% of all agricultural land, yet provides only 18% of global calories and 37% of protein.
* 60% of hydrocarbon production is used for transportation with more than half of that going to personal use.
* The world generates ∼50 million tons of electronic waste per year, but only ∼17% is formally recycled.
There's a lot of slack in the system. We can easily improve the efficiency of society with no material loss and tons of quality of life improvements for people.
We won't. but we could. And the reason we won't is because there isn't really and there won't really be any existential pressure to do so.
So the species at large will keep plodding along as we do, driving from fast food drive-thru to fast food drive thru stuffing cheese burgers into our faces while clever people work to make things like elegant self replicating machines that can colonize the solar system.
You are a self-replicating machine running on top of a massive web of other self replicating machines. You are fundamentally constrained by the energy and materials available to you, as is your entire operating stack. You are a petal on a fractal flower whose growth, already exponential, threatens to crack its pot.
Incidentally, crackpot would be a good way to describe these sorts of pieces, if the person writing them did not so obviously benefit from writing them.