- #1
Tiger Blood
- 50
- 11
I remember reading Robert Zubrin's book "Entering Space" about how to travel in space and terraform planets. In one place he gets into somewhat of a conundrum about robot society, like could robots by themselves live on a planet and "reproduce"
To me this is similar to somehwat older idea that one day robots will do all the manual work in the world and people will just relax, do the creative work of thinking etc.
Nevertheless Zubrin seems to conclude that it's impossible and that human factor must be invovlved:
But isn't this same as saying that we will never have complicated machines because for a machine to be complicated it must have parts made by a machine so that at one point humans have to make a machine that will make a machine. And yet all the machines that we have today have parts that were made by machines, because that treshold from human hand to machine part happened somwhere in the past and doesn't have to happen anymore. We will always have a machine that has parts that were made by a machine.
So couldn't robots dig the iron for the parts as well as use the knowledge?
To me this is similar to somehwat older idea that one day robots will do all the manual work in the world and people will just relax, do the creative work of thinking etc.
Nevertheless Zubrin seems to conclude that it's impossible and that human factor must be invovlved:
"But who would make the parts? Consider what is necessary to make even a simple part, such as a stainless steel screw.
To make the steel for the screw, iron, coal, and alloying elements from all over the world need to be transported to a steel mill. They need to be transported by rail, ship, truck, or plane, and all of these contrivances must be made in factories or shipyards of great complexity, each of which involves thousands of components shipped in from all over the world, by various devices, made in various facilities, etc. So just supplying the steel for the screw actually involves the work of thousands of factories and millions of workers.
If we then consider who made the food, clothing, and housing used by all those workers, who taught them, and who wrote the books that educated them, we find that a large fraction of the present and past human race was involved. And that's just the steel for the screw. If we now consider the processes needed to put the thread on the screw-but I think you get my point. Self-replicating machines cannot exist unless the parts they require are ready-made. This will never be the case for machines built out of factory produced gadgets."
But isn't this same as saying that we will never have complicated machines because for a machine to be complicated it must have parts made by a machine so that at one point humans have to make a machine that will make a machine. And yet all the machines that we have today have parts that were made by machines, because that treshold from human hand to machine part happened somwhere in the past and doesn't have to happen anymore. We will always have a machine that has parts that were made by a machine.
So couldn't robots dig the iron for the parts as well as use the knowledge?