Just finished Robin Cooks latest “Seizure.” Excellent! And Robin Cook has finally changed his formula. This one didn’t start out with the internal description of a virus eating away a persons insides. I loved that formula, but it was getting old, since he used it in about 15 books.
The real reason I’m posting is to summarize a few points in another book I read about a month ago called “I’m working on that” by William Shatner. Yeah, I know, William Shatner! He’s an actor right? Well, he’s written an excellent NON fiction book here. I highly recommend it. It’s about what the future holds for the next 50 – 200 years. What I wanted to do here is write down the most interesting ideas, because I’ve already forgotten them, and I don’t want to forget! So I’m thumbing through the book and here goes:
1) Utility fog: proposed by J. Storrs Hall, first in Extropy magazine. Invisible robots about 10 microns across are dubbed Foglets. By Nano-bot standards, these are gargantuan. They are 10,000 times larger than a nanomachine. Now if you have say a few billion foglets floating around in your house, you have Utility fog. Each foglet is a very sophisticated robot and is networked to every other foglet. Each foglet has, at it’s center, a dodecahedron (a ball with 12 sides) Each of these 12 surfaces will have a mechanical arms with grippers. All these grippers insure each foglet can connect to any other foglet in nearly unlimited ways. Here’s a Picture.
So, for example, lets say you want a grand piano in your house. You boot up your computer, and billions of foglets instantly know what to do. They fly together and lock their little arms until something that looks like a grand piano forms right in front of your eyes. It is NOT a grand piano, If you hit a key it would not make the correct sound. That’s because foglet formed objects are only 1/10th the density of real objects. But, they are objects that consist of billions of extremely powerful computers, so this particular grand piano, fradulent as it actually is, would be a machine capable of digitally faking the sound of a grand piano. So it would look the same and sound the same! Even though it wasn’t operating the same.
Utility fog pretty much makes it possible to create any environment you want. Your entire house could be made of the stuff and it could redesign itself at the owners whim. Impossible? We are already building machines that are micron sized. We just need billions of them. In fact, we need nano-bots to make the foglets in these quantities. A chicken/egg problem, it seems to me. But it seems like a reasonable idea that will come to fruition someday.
Refs:
Utility Fog
Nanotechnology: the Coming Revolution in Molecular Manufacturing
Foresight Institute, nanotechnology’s leading forum for discussion
2) Biostasis, or freezing yourself so you can be reanimated in the future: Great progress is being made in this field; this from researcher Ralph Merkle. Vitrification is a process of freezing without ice crystal damage. What it does is simply stop biological time…cold, with no damage. Vitrification already works for embryos, ova, skin, pancreatic islets, and blood vessels for transplant. The problem, is the larger the object, the harder the job of freezing without damage. Cryoprotectants, or antifreeze, have to be pumped into your system, because of the size issue. The problem is that the antifreeze is itself poisonous. Merkle says there are 3 breakthroughs: First, new ways have been found to mix cryoprotectants to make them less poisonous. Second, new ice blocking chemicals have been developed, so that less anitfreeze is needed, and third, researchers have found a way to chill cryopatients 10X faster than before (assuming you are only chilling your head, you can use DNA to rebuild your body)
Even though the damage is less, nanobots will still be required to be injected into your system to repair whatever damage there is, including the original reason you died. The good news about vitrification, is that it almost guarantees that you will be up and about alot sooner then you might have been with the old method, shortening the suspension of your animation.
Success looks pretty likely, says Ralph, I mean, I like it alot better than the alternative.
3) The (possible) evolution of robots:
First generation: approx 2010. brainpower of a lizard, personality of a washing machine. Still several steps beyond where we are at now. These robots will do the work we hate: pull weeds, clean house, assemble stuff where the directions say “some assembly required”. Pretty good sense of sight, and perhaps multiple hands/arms. They’ll be able to see and get around without destroying eveything in their path. They’ll be able to put a dish in the dishwasher without breaking it.
Second generation: approx 2020. brainpower of a mouse, 30X smarter than gen 1 robots. Run a mouse through a maze and it starts to figure out where the cheese is. Adaptable, so behavior that works is rewarded, behavior that fails is weakened or discarded. This generation will do most of it’s learning through trial and error. If the robot can’t figure it out on it’s own, it goes to it’s owner and asks: “What in the name of Asimov is this?”
Third generation: approx 2030. brainpower of a monkey. 3 trillion instructions/second. What we have now is an extremely mobile supercomputer. Instead of making many mistakes from trial and error, this robot thinks ahead, and works problems out in it’s “mind.” Gen-3’s will be able to watch us do things, learn the job, AND IMPROVE ON IT. This is the scary part, they will also be wirelessly connected to each other, and will be able to share information with other robots.
Fourth Generation: approx 2040. 100 trillion instructions per second. Gen-4’s will be able to navigate, see, sense as well or better than us, be conscious and capable of reasoning. You may not want to debate one of these robots, you’ll probably lose.
“Why did you put flowers on the table?”
Gen-3: Because I thought it would cheer Hannah up.
Gen-4: Well, I know she and Dexter have been having problems lately. It’s frustrating for her; he doesn’t ever seem to listen. Sometimes he gets self absorbed, don’t you think?….
Ref: “Mind Children”, Hans Moravec, Harvard University Press
When will computer hardware match the human brain?
4) Wearable computers, gadgetry of the future. The Geography of the human body is a big deal. In a nutshell the obstacles are: 1) devise small machines that 2) not only do their jobs, but 3) don’t make you uncomfortable no matter what your shape, and 4) no matter which way you move.
Cellphones embedded in your jaw bone. One tap activates, and you just start talking.
A form fitting backpack with a GPS system, gently nudges you in the right direction. No funky eyeglasses or screens to read. It just gently guides.
there’s other stuff….read the book!
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