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).
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.
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.
They are not talking about developing a life based on silicon but about robots that can repair or improve themselves.
But also don't forget that evolution is not determinist : although you are probably right that silicon based life cannot exist, it's not because it doesn't exist that it is impossible
> First, robot metabolism cannot rely on active physical support from any external system to accomplish its growth; the robot must grow using only its own abilities.
Not only this is extremely restrictive, but it is in contradiction with the second point
> Second, the only external provision to robot metabolism is energy and material in the form of robots or robot parts.
As long as there are enough paperclips to consume at the lowest trophic level we should be okay, right? Right?
"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
Crabs on the Island, by Anatoly Dneprov, fits better in the idea.
More about grey goo (don't remember the source of the idea)
Is it actually growing, or is it swarm-like assembly, such as a coral colony?
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.
These scientists should play Horizon Zero Dawn and seriously reconsider. This feels like a bad idea (however technologically impressive it is).
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.
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.
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Pitch them to Elon Musk instead. That's all he seems to care about.
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
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."
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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"?
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".
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.
In practice, it's always the evil guy saying that though.
Or if you flip cause and effect, power corrupts.
That's a common saying, but honestly I don't really buy it anymore: I feel like it's just a selection bias: in average one does not climb up to the top unless they are a psycho.
That has basiscally been the cringeworthy stunt of Sam Altmann playing chuunibyou claiming his AI is oh so dangerous.
Demonic scientists are thinking hard how to feed our planet to machines.