| Imagine a humanoid robot that is comparable to your average joe in terms of dexterity and stamina like let's say as a high water mark it can rebuild a car engine and do basic dentistry for sixteen hours of the day as long as it recharges for the other eight. Let's say that it has the ability to carry a robot of equal weight about 25 km and can repair that fellow robot provided that it has the necessary parts and a basic tool set and the equivalent to your average residential garage type environment to work in[0] (but like really could do it in the field). If you had a pair of two of these robots and your run of the mill warehouse full of their spare parts (assume a tape of infinite length...) so that with careful planning between the two of them they could do the necessary preventative maintenance on each other so that they didn't break down at the same time, or could go rescue the other if it broke down unexpectedly in the field, how long would it take them to build the infrastructure necessary to produce new parts to replenish their stockpile and generate new robots so that they could experience exponential growth? When I watch stuff like Primitive Technology[1] I'm in awe at how asingle well-fed and educated human being can with the right preparation and research can go into a jungle setting and speed run up to the iron age. It makes me wonder about the minimum viable number of people and education/knowledge/experience required to do the same thing for realsies to the computer age. It's just a pipe dream or two about when a robot equivalent to the average joe is a thing and when I see videos like the one we're talking about or the recent one from Boston Dynamics the gears in my mind start turning. There was a time when computers didn't exist. Then they did. At first computers used to be the size of buildings, then they became the size of floors of buildings, then the size of rooms, then the size of appliances[2], and so on and so forth. we're seeing this sort of miniaturization across segments of industry driven in large part by the miniaturization of semiconductors. If you take a big picture view the economy as a whole it is a self replicating machine. As are the vertiable Adam and Eve that made that economy. In a complicated sort of orobourous way the entire economy is made up of humanoids (and let's not forget our quadroped hoven friends who serve as feedstock btw, or chickens and tuna and so on...) who replicate in some way or another. There is this sort of impending collision between the organic and inorganic self replicating aspects of our economic system. Ribozyme and hominid, compiler and automobile assembly line, what are the difference exactly? [0] https://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/illustration/doctor-workin...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
[2] https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/11101401564... |
There is a lot happening here. Really big jumps. Sure, humanoid robots with lots of spare parts could repair each other. You could also just imagine a robot that never broke down for this thought experiment. Still, going from nothing to "can build more complex humanoid robots", even with very persistent workers who never get tired, is an extreme endeavor.
I suppose some day the equipment to build a humanoid could be cheap and accessible to home fabricators. But that equipment still will not just be "a humanoid", it will be specialized machinery. You could certainly have humanoids operate that machine, but I still see this scenario as "imagine you have two humanoids. now imagine you have two humanoids and a humanoid manufacturing machine. they could make infinite humanoids". There is no getting around the fact that a machine that makes humanoids will be a separate machine.
Will it be interesting when that happens? Yes, absolutely.