Grey goo
en.wikipedia.org
Grey goo
1–10 of 43 posts
Re: Grey goo
#2Reminds me of what humans are doing with this planet.
Re: Grey goo
#3Reminds me of what humans are doing with this planet.
I suppose ultimately it models any organism at its simplest level.
Re: Grey goo
#4This assumes that some artificial organism we construct would be more robust and efficient at self-replication than run-of-the-mill single celled organisms.
Re: Grey goo
#5Self-replicating-nanobot Earth-death final-state.
Things like this always make me think of Sam's Archive's "Geocide" page. Which, by the way, points out that this does not in fact bring about the destruction of the Earth: http://qntm.org/destroy
Re: Grey goo
#6Self-replicating machines of the macroscopic variety were originally described by mathematician John von Neumann, and are sometimes referred to as von Neumann machines.
I suppose their memory holds both code and data?
Re: Grey goo
#7This assumes that some artificial organism we construct would be more robust and efficient at self-replication than run-of-the-mill single celled organisms.
i'd assume that we could build something smarter than run-of-the-mill single celled organisms, which would be the important thing.
Re: Grey goo
#8Self-replicating machines of the macroscopic variety were originally described by mathematician John von Neumann, and are sometimes referred to as von Neumann machines. I suppose their memory holds both code and data?
Well, von Neumann was John McCarthy's menthor, and McCarthy made LISP. There's no wonder why programming code (e.g. functions) in LISP is data, and why LISP is heavily used in AI.
Re: Grey goo
#9This assumes that some artificial organism we construct would be more robust and efficient at self-replication than run-of-the-mill single celled organisms.
What's wrong with that assumption? There are some efficient mechanisms that evolution hasn't invented because they could not be reached by a series of gradual refinements. The wheel has long been said to be one of them, but I guess now we know that that's not strictly true. But nature's wheels are all very small and are bound to remain small because of their purpose, even though many organisms could benefit from large wheels.
It's true that replication is evolution's specialty, but maybe the initial construction of grey goo would require some specialized environment that doesn't naturally occur. Nuclear bomb isn't so complicated that evolution couldn't figure it out, for example, but it didn't and won't anytime soon.
Re: Grey goo
#10In a battle between Grey Goo and a Paperclip Maximizer, who wins?