No. Not to take away Holden’s thunder but Von Neumann already postulated the possibility of self-replicating probes colonizing the galaxy. Indeed, I might be wrong here but it is exactly this kind of thinking that drove Fermi to pose his famous question.
Most of this stuff was fairly common in extropian/hard scifi Usenet circles in the 90′s I believe.
My point was that during von Neumanns time there was plenty of reason to think such probes might never be possible, or far in the future. The exponential nature of certain types of improvements wasn’t yet known.
We can’t build Von Neumann probes in the real world—though we can in the digital world. What kind of significant (!) new information have we obtained about the feasibility of galaxywide colonization through Von Neumann probes?
We made computers with billions of times as much compute and memory from the 1960s. Previously intractable problems like machine perception and machine planning to resolve arbitrary failures—were only really begun to be solved with neural networks around 2014ish.
Previously they were theoretical. Now it’s just a matter of money and iterations.
See previously to define a subtask for a von neuman machibe like “mine rocks from the asteroid you landed on in other tasks and haul them to the smelter” could have a near infinite number of failures. And with previous robotics each failure had to be explicitly handled by a programmer who anticipated the specific failure or a worker on site to resolve it.
With machine planning algorithms you can have the machine estimate the action that has a (better than random chance, ideally close to the true global maxima) probability of scoring well on a heuristic of success. And you need neural networks to even perceive the asteroid surface in arbitrary scenarios and lighting conditions. And you need realistic computer graphics and simulated physics to even model what the robot will see.
It’s still many generations of technology away but we can actually in concrete terms specify how to do this, and how we could iterate to a working system if we wanted to.
No. Not to take away Holden’s thunder but Von Neumann already postulated the possibility of self-replicating probes colonizing the galaxy. Indeed, I might be wrong here but it is exactly this kind of thinking that drove Fermi to pose his famous question.
Most of this stuff was fairly common in extropian/hard scifi Usenet circles in the 90′s I believe.
My point was that during von Neumanns time there was plenty of reason to think such probes might never be possible, or far in the future. The exponential nature of certain types of improvements wasn’t yet known.
We can’t build Von Neumann probes in the real world—though we can in the digital world.
What kind of significant (!) new information have we obtained about the feasibility of galaxywide colonization through Von Neumann probes?
We made computers with billions of times as much compute and memory from the 1960s. Previously intractable problems like machine perception and machine planning to resolve arbitrary failures—were only really begun to be solved with neural networks around 2014ish.
Previously they were theoretical. Now it’s just a matter of money and iterations.
See previously to define a subtask for a von neuman machibe like “mine rocks from the asteroid you landed on in other tasks and haul them to the smelter” could have a near infinite number of failures. And with previous robotics each failure had to be explicitly handled by a programmer who anticipated the specific failure or a worker on site to resolve it.
With machine planning algorithms you can have the machine estimate the action that has a (better than random chance, ideally close to the true global maxima) probability of scoring well on a heuristic of success. And you need neural networks to even perceive the asteroid surface in arbitrary scenarios and lighting conditions. And you need realistic computer graphics and simulated physics to even model what the robot will see.
It’s still many generations of technology away but we can actually in concrete terms specify how to do this, and how we could iterate to a working system if we wanted to.
Fair enough.