Hmm, it is interesting that that exists but it seems like it is cannot have been very serious because it dates from over 30 years ago and no followup activity happened.
Serious? It’s a paper constructed as part of an official NASA workshop, the participants of which are all respected people in their fields and still working.
Why hasn’t more work happened in the time since? It has at places like Zyvex and the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. But at NASA there were political issues that weren’t addressed at all by people advocating for a self-replication programme then or since.
Freitas has more recently done a book-length survey of work on self-replicating machines before and after the NASA workshop. It’s available online:
(BTW the same fallacy could be committed against AGI or molecular nanotechnology, both of which date to the 50′s but have had little followup activity since, except spurts of interest here and there.)
I think this is because Freitas and Drexler and others who might have pursued clanking replicators became concerned with nanotechnology instead. It seems to me that clanking replicators are much easier, because we already have all the tools and components to build them (screwdrivers, electic motors, microchips, etc.). Nanotechnology, while incorporating the same ideas, is far less feasible and may be seen as a red herring that has cost us 30 years of progress in self-replicating machines. Clanking replicators are also much less dangerous, because it is much easier to pull the plug or throw in a wrench when something goes wrong.
Hmm, it is interesting that that exists but it seems like it is cannot have been very serious because it dates from over 30 years ago and no followup activity happened.
Serious? It’s a paper constructed as part of an official NASA workshop, the participants of which are all respected people in their fields and still working.
Why hasn’t more work happened in the time since? It has at places like Zyvex and the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. But at NASA there were political issues that weren’t addressed at all by people advocating for a self-replication programme then or since.
Freitas has more recently done a book-length survey of work on self-replicating machines before and after the NASA workshop. It’s available online:
http://www.molecularassembler.com/KSRM.htm
(BTW the same fallacy could be committed against AGI or molecular nanotechnology, both of which date to the 50′s but have had little followup activity since, except spurts of interest here and there.)
I think this is because Freitas and Drexler and others who might have pursued clanking replicators became concerned with nanotechnology instead. It seems to me that clanking replicators are much easier, because we already have all the tools and components to build them (screwdrivers, electic motors, microchips, etc.). Nanotechnology, while incorporating the same ideas, is far less feasible and may be seen as a red herring that has cost us 30 years of progress in self-replicating machines. Clanking replicators are also much less dangerous, because it is much easier to pull the plug or throw in a wrench when something goes wrong.