the Foresight Institute

Accelerating Future » RepRap “Mendel” to be Released Soon!.
Nicw round-up with videos of the latest in the Rep-Rap world.

There’s a nice article over at the Singularity Hub that’s a round-up of currently-available haptics devices.  They seem primarily excited over the prospects of haptics in gaming, but there are two reasons we’re interested in developments.
First is simply telerobotics, as in Feynman Path manipulation.  We want the feedback to help develop an intuitive feel for [...]

Engineering and analysis in the field of SRMs is unusual in many ways.  Eric Drexler has posted a paper about differences in evolutionary capacity in mechanical and biological systems that’s worth a look.
Purely coincidentally, we at Foresight have been discussing self-replication in the context of the Feynman Path and I came up with an example [...]

Just Do It
It’s the 20th anniversary of the first Foresight Conference this year. Over the intervening two decades, one of the most common questions of Foresight members and supporters has been, “What can I do to help with the development of nanotech?”  Foresight has had many useful programs, and encouraged development in many ways (notably [...]

Scaling KSRM Design Considerations

There hasn’t been a lot of work on self-replicating workcells. There’s been plenty on robotic workcells that don’t replicate, but almost all of this falls into the “more complex than what it makes” category. The basic idea goes back to Waldo: imitate a machine shop and the person servicing the machines [...]

Where to Start?
In the last post we suggested that finding the appropriate starting point was one of the critical items to address in forming a Feynman Path roadmap, and that is true. A thorough survey of available techniques should be made, and recent advances in machining, nanomanipulation, and so forth taken advantage of.
However, as [...]

Plan of Attack
The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer. (Seabees motto)
There are at least two major parts to a project to implement the Feynman Path. The first is essentially to work out a roadmap for the second. In particular,

Design a scalable, remotely-operated manufacturing and manipulation workstation capable of replicating itself [...]

Open Questions
Taking Feynman’s Path to nanotech, or even studying it seriously, would require finding answers to a number of open questions. These questions, however, are quite important and knowing the answers will be invaluable in understanding the envelope of possibilities for future manufacturing technology.

Is it in fact possible to build a compact self-replicating machine [...]

Is it Worth Starting Now?

Surely, you will say, it would have been wonderful if back in 1959 people had taken Feynman seriously and really tried the Feynman path: we’d have the full-fledged paraphernalia of real, live molecular machinery now, with everything ranging from nanofactories to cell-repair machines.
After all, it’s been 50 years. The [...]

MEMS
Another reason the Feynman Path may not have been tried is the perception that a machine-based approach has been tried in the form of MEMS, and that standard machine designs do not work at this scale and below due to stiction.
MEMS are in fact crippled by this phenomenon, which is a essentially an increase of [...]

Self-replicating Machines

So why hasn’t the Feynman Path been attempted, or at least studied and analyzed? One possible reason is that there still seems to be a “giggle factor” associated with the notion of a compact, macroscale, self-replicating machine using standard fabrication and assembly techniques. Although studied in the abstract since von Neumann, and in [...]

The Problem

In 1997, Philip Collins, then a graduate student at Berkeley, won the Foresight Institute’s Distinguished Student Award for his experimental verification that a defect location in a carbon nanotube could form a near-perfect rectifier, as well as various other heterojunction device behaviors, as had been theoretically predicted just the year before. “Such junctions could [...]