From: clarke@acme.ucf.edu (Thomas Clarke)
Newsgroups: sci.nanotech
Subject: The Industirial Egg or Why Nano? (was Surviving)
Date: 22 Jan 93 03:52:08 GMT
Organization: University of Central Florida

I wonder why nanotech must be developed in the small, and some
comments on Malcom McMahon's posting.

In article <Jan.19.22.41.18.1993.23082@planchet.rutgers.edu>  
cuhes@csv.warwick.ac.uk (Malcolm McMahon) writes:
> 
> On the subject of simple design and safety engineering my impression  is 
> that  engineers do no like to trust computers at all in  safety-critical 
> systems.
  
See below.  Detailed discussion on building reliable hardware deleted.

> Actually by the time you have a replicator you are most 
> of the way. You just have to solve docking, comunications, problems of 
> cooperation and what to do about nano that dies on you.
> 
> I  don't find the hot-house idea very credible.  What  conditions  would 
> nano  be  likely  to  require?   Not  high  tempartures  and  pressures, 
> certainly,  

See discussion following egg comments.

>      I  can  envisage  an "egg" sealed within which was  the  seed  nano 
> together  with  enough  material  to create a  larger  enclosure  in  an 
> environment  in which the nano could operate long enough to  build  that 
> enclosure.  It  would  burst  out of the egg  as  a  swelling  membrane, 
> equiped with selective transport mechanisms to take in raw materials.

This reminds me of the concept of the industrial egg.  That is a critical
mass of machinery and computers etc that you can place in an empty field.
Once activated, the egg then unfolds, proceeds to mine and process 
materials, reproduce parts of itself as necessary, build new pieces
etc. etc.  The final result is a field with a factory in it that
produces, say, automobiles automatically.  Depending how things
are arranged, the industrial egg or a copy might be found sitting next
to the factory ready for re-use.  With different software, presumably
the same egg could generate a factory for VCRs.  
{I don't recall where I read about this, but it was mentioned in connection
with von Neumann (or self reproducing) machines}

The industrial egg sounds a lot like the universal replicator of nanotech
fame.  I always invisaged the egg as being about the size of semi-trailer
truck.  You turn it on, solar panels unfold, little bulldozers roll out,
an electric furnace fires up, numerically controlled machine tools
begin to turn, chemical retorts start to bubble, etc. etc.  

Clearly, industrial eggs are possible.  Only now they are the size
of Gary, Indiana and use biological neural networks for control.  
The size could probably be vastly reduced once we understand how
to even build any kind of industrial egg.  This brings up the
question in the title, why does nanotech apparently offer
solutions to problems that we don't know how to yet solve in
macrotech?

I think the hot-house ideas may offer a way out.  After all isn't
this how nature did it?  Get some sort of very crude replicator
going, then let it reproduce like mad with errors and under competition
so that only the fittest survive.  After 4 billion years you get
an industrial egg the size of Gary, Indiana.  Maybe the process
can be speeded up. 

> 
> Things that do scare me:
> 
> 3)   An  obscure  bug in the software of widely used  symbiotic  medical 
> nano.

Software bugs in medical machines have already killed people.  One was an
X-ray machine used to treat tumors - high dosage stuff.  The tech set
up the machine by entering commands into the computer and after
treatment had begun noticed that one of the parameters he had entered was  
wrong.  Since the user-unfriendly software required him to back out
through a series of menues and then reenter all the information 
over again, he just hit reset (crtl-alt-del?).  Unfortunately, the
software reset did not reset the hardware, until after machine rebooted.
In the meanwhile the patient fried.  I think hardware interlocks are
required on all such machines now.  Funny to contemplate software
approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
 
> 4)   The  mess  that we're going to make of the transition from  a  paid 
> work oriented society.

We already have this problem.  What are layed-off IBM workers going to
do?  Work at McDonalds?
 
Thomas Clarke
Institute for Simulation and Training, University of Central FL
12424 Research Parkway, Suite 300, Orlando, FL 32826
(407)658-5030, FAX: (407)658-5059, clarke@acme.ucf.edu