I am sure at least most of you have heard of free and open source software. If not, I am not quite sure which part of the headwaters of the Rio Negro you are living on and how you managed to get your satellite internet link past the croc’s and piranha’s.
You can be excused however, if you are unaware of the open source hardware movement. There are people out there designing everything from CPU’s to rocket engines in a global network but only the very plugged in are aware of these efforts. One stands above them all in my mind, and not just because I know a ‘kiwi’ who is one of the key participants: the Darwin open source replicator project.
A replicator is a machine which cannot only make things, but can make copies of itself. In the ‘classical’ literature the macro versions of this are known as Von Neuman machines; in more recent decades most who keep up with such things have come to associate them with Drexlerian nanoscale replicators. The nanoreplicator may be decades away, but the first generation of macroscale open source replicators is already available and spreading.
Darwin is not quite a full Von Neuman machine but it is a good start:
RepRap 1.0 “Darwin” is a Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) rapid prototyping machine that is capable of making the majority of its own component parts. It is available free under the GNU General Public Licence from this website to everyone.
As Darwin can copy itself, once you have one you can make others for your friends; or if they have one you can ask them to make one for you. Of course, you can also make as many as you want for yourself; the more you have, the faster you will be able to make other items.
If you have some room to spare and want to play too, I suggest you join. Once there are enough of these gadgets around the world, I am sure there will be plenty of folks passing around the designs of all sorts of nifty things for you to build with it.
Within a handful or two of decades we will build spaceships this way.
There’s a very active project at the University of Bath as well, details at RepRap
Both interesting and impressive.
I’d be a lot more impressed if the ‘added ingredients’ didn’t include things like stepper motors and personal computers.
The stepper motor could surely be replaced by clockwork. An escapement mechanism should be possible with the set-up they’ve got, and the toothed wheels they appear to have done already.
Doing the programming using some variant on punched tape (made from plastic, of course) would be tricky, though. You would need mechanisms to turn the glue gun on and off, use a counter to time it, be able to reset the counter from the tape (the hard step), move the tape along one, and power it in synchronisation with the stepper clockwork moving the gun through space.
In theory you could build a Turing machine.
There would still be parts of course that would need to be added, like the glue gun nozzle and heater. But those are a lot easier to fabricate than a PC, and would give some hope for a real Von Neumann machine in the future.
Darwin is not quite a full Von Neuman machine. . .
Seems to me that it’s about as close to being a self-organising replicator as a lathe is.
Well, I hope the ethics, and protection of mere mortals, is sorted out properly. We don’t want trouble from rogue decendents of early machines.
Try the Three_Laws_of_Robotics from Asimov’s I Robot.
Interesting, and most impressive.
Best regards
And it works with all OSes as well. Nice.
Thanks. Very interesting.
Doesn’t matter if it is a true von Neuman machine or not, as long as all the add on components are standardised think of the effects when a version of this devices fourth generation descendant sits in every room in the house and a BIG version lives in the garage.
I give it five years, at most, before we all start obtaining practical 3D printers.
Given multiple nozzles spraying different materials (think colour inkjet) even an integral stepping motor could be built up layer by layer.
I’d like my Von Neuman machines to be big enough to have an off-switch I can activate thank you. Otherwise we might be needing those space ships to escape the waves of nano-sludge that the earth gets self-organized into.
And Nigel, the hook in most of Asimov’s robot stories is how the three laws fail to serve humanity.
Rich
🙂
Nano-sludge doesn’t work. It still needs energy to run.
In a sense, we already have it. The bacterial ecology is a set of nano-machines that break down pretty much anything they can to make more copies of themselves. They haven’t taken over the world yet. You could in theory get them acting as plagues – indeed, that’s one of the likelier applications – but the idea of them turning the Earth into a heaving ball of replicators, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, is fanciful.
I’ve been idly figuring out how you might improve the design of this macroscopic replicator to make it genuinely self-contained in my head this weekend – so far as I can see there’s nothing in there that can’t be done in constructible plastic, apart from a source of power, and the hot end of the filament extruder. You still need people to put the things together, but virtually all the components can be self-replicated which would put it a long way towards being a Von Neumann machine. I think that with some clever chemistry, using something like superglue with a separate fast-acting hardener, you could remove the need for the heat which is the last remaining obstacle. All it would need then is energy and the raw materials.
We’re a long way of needing to deal with the ethical issues of intelligent machines. A more immediate concern is the economic upheaval by making such automated fabrication widely available. The printing press caused a social upheaval, and the PC and internet even more so. What would this sort of capability do, if it takes off?
I was interested to read of their idea for building microfluidic chemical processing plants for making drugs. He seems to think people’ll be using it for therapeutic drugs. Ho. Ho.
Cool. Bionics.
Shift the economy farther away from manufacturing and (eventually) engineering and into raw materials, materials distribution and invention.
And litigation. 🙂
🙂
Yes, got a Turing tape going in one ear and out the other.
The point about opening up what was once the preserve of those with major concentrations of resources is that people don’t just do what those lucky individuals did – they do all sorts of other stuff too; stuff the authorities often don’t want them to do. The printing press was invented to print more copies of the Bible, but instead produced political pamphlets and porn. The internet was invented to preserve government command and control in the event of war and disaster and later to share scientific documents, and it also seems to have rather a lot of political pamphlets and porn, but much else as well. Spam, spying, databases, wiretaps, viruses, online-banking, censorship, and propaganda.
What’s the manufacturing equivalent? I’ve already mentioned little drugs factories. How about when they get that gene-splicing and DNA testing simplified and published? It might start with a home-brew paternity testing, and move on to a splice-your-own-organism kits. Like, playing God for real? You can start with flick-knives and lock-pickers, and move onto some hilarious little booby-traps disguised as everyday objects. All those little jobs that you rely on vandals and burglars and smugglers not being able to do because they don’t have the tools; well all of a sudden they quite possibly can make them. Are you that unpleasant child with the funny eyes who wants to torture your kid sister a bit? Well, they don’t sell thumbscrews to kids in the shops, but now you can make your very own!
And don’t think they won’t.
Oh, most of it will be kiddies art projects and ornaments and DIY parts, and maybe the odd sex toy, but there’s always a dark side to these little advances. Compare what they thought computers would be used for in 1960 with the reality today, and see how little your ideas of earnest peasants freed from the tyranny of factories and able to make their own trade goods is likely to bear to the future.
This initiative, like most others, is probably going to fade away without going anywhere. But if it has half the potential these people are claiming – then this is another one of those can’t-put-the-toothpaste-back-in-the-tube moments. Fears of machines taking over the world are paranoia for the time being and it will certainly enable a lot of good things, but I don’t think it is out of place to hold some concern over where this all might be going, and how it might go horribly wrong.
The chemical equivalent of this project is much more interesting. We already have a fully functional replicator – DNA – and the tools to modify it and observe the results. You also get a lot of self-organisation and self-construction built-in when you work with DNA. Here is merely one of a dozen fascinating pieces of DNA engineering that are already up and running.
Pa Annoyed — I enjoyed your comments about how the machine might get closer to being a real Von Neumann machine, but all that worrying about the nefarious uses one might be put to sounds like something from a Daily Mail column or (worse) a politician’s speech.
Those are the arguments that will be used to outlaw such devices, and to excuse the controls that will be needed to enforce those laws.
In reality, we all know that if someone wants to do evil they don’t need a 3D printer to do it. All kinds of weapons are readily available. That kid in your example doesn’t need thumbscrews — an imagination and a supply of household items will suffice.
And while there may remain new stuff that bad guys previously lacking the resources can do, that goes for the good guys too.
Rob,
Was that an explanation of why what I said was wrong, or why we shouldn’t talk about it?
I can of course make the same sort of argument about surveillance cameras. A totalitarian government can repress people without ubiquitous surveillance cameras watching our every move, there are all sorts of methods available to the imaginative dictator, therefore we shouldn’t worry about it. Yes?
As I said, I don’t see it as any reason not to do it (as if we could possibly stop it). I just think it’s not a bad idea to think about potential bad consequences before they turn up, as well as the good.
Daily Mail! 😀
Seems to me that it’s about as close to being a self-organising replicator as a lathe is.
I’d have to agree with that.
We’re talking about different things though when we’re talking “3D printers” and self-replicating machines, aren’t we? Presumably sex toys, thumb screws and missing IKEA parts won’t be self replicating, they’ll be programmed into a machine that then replicates them. Self-replicating machines require themselves to be independent and self-organising, do they not?
Yes, self-replicators are different from 3D printers. I think the idea is that self-replicators can spread without anyone with the requisite capital manufacturing capability making and selling it. All it costs are the raw materials, which in turn can be made from widely available crops. The advantage is that there is no way the authorities can control it. You can’t ban or regulate their sale, any more than you can ban pirate software. And instead of one company working on improving the design, you potentially have thousands of hobbyists working independently on improving it. Their idea is to take advantage of the exponential growth possible to a replicator, rather than the fairly linear growth of conventional manufacturing.
They’re only just starting. I think this is just the proof-of-principle to try to get the thing off the ground – real self-replication will come later. Think of the industrial revolution, and the evolution from windmills and watermills through to power-looms and production lines, but multiplied exponentially.
Explain von Neumann machines without addressing address lines. Heresy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dg96tefnEU
http://alldaysci-fi.cerizmo.com/