Hugo de Garis (degaris@hip.atr.co.jp) wrote:
: ...referring to Ralph Merkel's opinion "I dont want nanotechnology to
: evolve" - we may not have much choice. Molecular evolutionary
: techniques may be the only method human beings will have to go beyond
: the "barrier of the blueprintable", meaning that at a molecular
: scale the complexities will be so huge with an Avagadro number of
: components, interacting in complex non linear ways, that it will be
: impossible to build complex structures without using Darwinian
: mutate and select policies.
Letting nanobots "design" themselves by evolutionary principles is a VERY scarey idea. We probably couldn't reliably guess what would turn out to be an important criterion for selection, and we couldn't guess what mechanisms would result. There's no reason to think these evolutionary processes would take our values and desires to heart.
Granted, if we use computationally feasible design tools, we *won't* explore the entire space of everything that could ever be designed. But a great many members of that set are very dangerous and we wouldn't want those objects to exist. The designs we create will be highly redundant, and possibly quite boring under an STM. That's okay, they'll still be useful and hopefully safe.
: I use CAMs to evolve artificial brains. Eventually we want a
: billion neurons nano-CAM-Brain.
There is a safe way to do this with NT. Do not use random mutations and selections to design computing elements. Instead, use NT to build an enormously parallel computer, where individual computing elements are human-designed. You may lose one or two orders of magnitude in efficiency, but who cares? You still get the economies of scale that NT will give you. Now run any darn-fool algorithms you please, however random, on the enormously parallel computer. (That has a bit of a ring to it... "EPC"... I like that.) You can do just as much as you could by allowing the hardware itself to evolve. In fact you can probably do it alot faster since software is more malleable than hardware. And you won't turn the Earth into gray goo, which would irritate billions of complete strangers, and make it even more difficult to commute than it is already.
-- ===================================================================== Will Ware <wware@world.std.com> Sorry, no clever quotes... PGP fingerprint = 45 A8 72 2C D1 49 10 CC F0 CF 48 FB 93 BF 72 89