[HN Gopher] Robot metabolism: Toward machines that can grow by c...
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Robot metabolism: Toward machines that can grow by consuming other
machines
Author : XzetaU8
Score : 48 points
Date : 2025-07-20 08:17 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| littlestymaar wrote:
| _Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they
| could, they didn't stop to think if they should._
| neom wrote:
| Powerful self assembling machines controlled by artificial
| intelligence more capable than the average human, not your
| flavor of the month then I guess?
|
| More seriously, are there public examples where
| inventors/technologists have ever actually said "we could do
| this but we won't"?
| aeve890 wrote:
| Common excuse for this kind of behavior is "evil people will
| do it regardless, so the only option for us is do it too to
| be prepared for when evil people use it for evil purposes".
| h2zizzle wrote:
| It's weird that no one thinks to build an Iron Dome until
| well after the nuclear arms race has been chugging along
| for a while. The goal should be to checkmate potentially
| ruinous branches of a tech tree, not to be in perpetual
| check with them as they grow ever longer and spikier.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| In practice, it's always the evil guy saying that though.
| akomtu wrote:
| Demonic scientists are thinking hard how to feed our planet to
| machines.
| MrFoof wrote:
| Possible outcome: Gray goo scenario
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo)
|
| A recent "popular culture" reference to the scenario mentioned
| in the article is the video game, _" Horizon: Zero Dawn."_
| gavinray wrote:
| "Mortal Engines" begins...
|
| (One of my favorite Sci-Fi Young Adult series I read growing up)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortal_Engines
|
| tl;dr = Post apocalypse, cities are giant mobile machines that
| eat and integrate smaller cities to survive
| gmuslera wrote:
| Crabs on the Island, by Anatoly Dneprov, fits better in the
| idea.
| datameta wrote:
| As long as there are enough paperclips to consume at the lowest
| trophic level we should be okay, right? Right?
| chmod775 wrote:
| If these things were truly possible on Earth, chances are life-
| forms based on it would have evolved.
|
| For mostly-self-sufficient organisms in earth's environment, the
| versatility of carbon appears to outperform silicon on every
| metric that counts.
|
| The molecular complexity of a _single_ human lung cell still
| absolutely dwarfs that of even the most modern CPUs we are able
| to manufacture (apple to oranges, but true).
| Out_of_Characte wrote:
| The evolution of our species was based on the carbon lifecycle.
| Yet the machines we produce are not evolving in a similar
| manner at all, just the ability to redraw everything from
| scratch is a luxury that evolution cannot make use of.
|
| To reiterate, The belief that evolving machines have to match
| the kind of evolution we're subjected to is illogical. Machines
| wouldn't be there without us and we wouldn't have what we have
| now without evolving our machines.
| nickpinkston wrote:
| It may be that life forms would have evolved it, but it could
| be us evolving to be able to create it, like spiders
| "inventing" their high-tension silk.
|
| We're just way more capable of high complexity.
| targetx wrote:
| These scientists should play Horizon Zero Dawn and seriously
| reconsider. This feels like a bad idea (however technologically
| impressive it is).
| rightbyte wrote:
| In general it might be a bad idea to prospect dystopian sci-fi
| novels for VC pitching decks. Like, are there no adults in the
| room anymore.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Pitch them to Elon Musk instead. That's all he seems to care
| about.
| neom wrote:
| Just thinking aloud: I've been in this industry for what will
| be going on 20 years now (startup/tech/venture funded stuff)
| - my observation is that things have become incredibly
| abstract over the past 15 years - people are very abstracted
| away from what they are really doing...in that, the capital
| is increasingly abstracted far far away from capital
| providers, capital allocators are increasingly abstracted
| away from the outcomes of the capital they allocate, and
| capital deployers are increasingly abstracted away from
| society at large. I do occasionally still run into people who
| I think "this is a fully formed sensible thoughtful
| responsible human" - but it's incredibly few and far between
| - I think the reason is primarily how decoupled everything in
| the system has become from it's upstream and downstream
| effects. The other consequence of this is that the
| competitive nature of market dynamics shift, things become
| hyper competitive because the unknowns become deeper. The
| inevitable geometry of large, scaled systems.
| omneity wrote:
| Is it actually growing, or is it swarm-like assembly, such as a
| coral colony?
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| As far as I can tell, neither is the case. The modules are all
| controlled wirelessly from an outside system, so the individual
| moving parts have no separate identity.
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(page generated 2025-07-20 23:01 UTC)