It's almost time! Phase 1 of this project is nearly complete. Just a few hours until my first 3D printed robot skeleton is complete. Now the second phase, even more difficult.
How can a robot turn $1 into a self replicating robot factory? How can a computer learn something? How can a search engine know if my search is good? How can computers become self aware? How does the Internet know which webpage to show me and which to ignore? How can an electronic device predict what you’re going to ask next? How do all these things work together?
All are fascinating questions. Unfortunately, most people just assume that we know how it all works. So in my next series of articles, I will explain how to build your own Robot factory, teach your own Brain computer, build your own search engine, and explain why computers won’t ever be conscious.
We have to start with our base assumptions. We have robots we make them and we are running out of things we want to make with those robots. We need to make them for things that aren’t robots. Like $1 for example. How would the robots do that? How would it get $1 to make more $1? How would it get $1 to make more $1 of itself?
It would be a lot like how we got $1 in the first place. One of the many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many ways we got $1 is through the production of goods and services for the people who had $1 to start with. Let’s say there was a small company, a family business, a mom-and-pop shop, a garage-door-opener manufacturer, a bar owner that made $1 a day from the bar and $1 a beer in the bar.
It doesn’t have to be one of those places that sell one product, it can be whatever the market may need. That’s how they get the $1 from the people who had $1 to begin with. That’s how it all starts.
So the little company needs to be making stuff that people need to start with. Think of the stuff that people needed back in pre-historic times when nothing made anything for anything else. That was the stuff they needed. Then, just because the people had $1, did it follow that they needed to just keep making more of the same stuff? No. So the people started making something else. It wasn’t “one $1 factory, $1 can make everything else”. It was more like, “one person, $1 can make this, then, $2 can make this. $4 can make this. $8 can make this, etc.”
@AlphaLab is Design & Fabrication Lab Alpha
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