We only had one of them yesterday…
Pierre Oulette’s The Deus Machine foresees a future when technology will advance beyond humankind’s ability to advance it when machines are created with the specific purpose of building more advanced machines on their own.
It’s closer to the Star Trek replicator at the moment, but a UK scientist might have the first step in such a process.
If a UK professor is successful, homes of the future will have fridge-sized factories that can crank out everything from cups to digital cameras.
The household factories are based on rapid prototype machines used now to produce plastic components such as vehicle parts from computer designs.
Such machines cost tens of thousands of dollars, making them prohibitively expensive for most families.
But Adrian Bowyer of the University of Bath has come up with an idea for dropping their price: put them to work making copies of themselves.
This, of course, is a case of simple thinking leading to solutions for complex problems. Which is always fun. Kind of like the creation of the Infinite Improbability Drive (don’t know the story? Shame on you. It’s a classic)
You have machines that exist for the purpose of simplifying the manufacture of certain products. These machines are expensive to manufacture. So why not set these machines to manufacturing more of these machines?
Wait. Guiness in a bottle? Brilliant!