
The Promise and Peril of Programmable Matter - hunglee2
http://www.engineering.com/DesignerEdge/DesignerEdgeArticles/ArticleID/14967/The-Promise-and-Peril-of-Programmable-Matter.aspx
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louithethrid
Melding Plague

The Melding Plague is a nanotech virus that attacks anything that has
nanotechnology present within it and does not discriminate between organic and
synthetic structures. It attempts to hybridise or meld the nanomachines and
nanotechnological cybernetics that are commonly present in the bodies of
humans with the biological structure of their tissues at a subcellular level.
This results in horrific, uncontrolled, and invariably fatal modifications to
the infected body.

The most extreme example of a Plague outbreak is encountered in San Francisco,
the capital of Silicon Valley. Once the centre of culture during the Trump
Epoque (a Renaissance-like period of social and technological flowering), most
of the built environment and its inhabitants were embedded with sophisticated
programmable nanocybernetics. The coming of the Plague changed all this and
reduced the City and its inhabitants to a level of technological simplicity
that the Plague could not infect. By the time that the worst of the Plague had
passed, the City was almost unrecognisable, its towering skyline twisted and
deformed by its own autonomic self-repair systems, and the population
devastated by the Plague.

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EternalData
There's a future utopia somewhere where you can use programmable digital
monies that are a proxy for some sort of deeper more intrinsic value than our
current economic system, which in turn allows you to purchase and unlock
programmable materials. or maybe a world of abundance where that intermediate
layer of monetarily designated value simple ceases to be useful.

There's also a dystopia where programmable material overwhelms organic
material -- without the deep thinking and optimization runs undergone through
billions of years in time.

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smoyer
This sounds a lot like the warnings of "grey goo" described by K. Eric
Drexler's book "Engines of Creation". If we're going to design materials like
these, we need a fail-safe way to keep them in check!

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pixl97
>we need a fail-safe way to keep them in check

The first grey goo explosion happened a few billion years ago and there has
been a constant DNA battle ever since. I don't think there is a failsafe way
to make programmable matter. Either we get 'natural' evolution, where little
accidents in occur and alter the code which lead to nano-cancer, or people
will create such matter without safety checks. On top of this all of our man
made matter will be locked in war with the countless living nanobots, which
could lead to unexpected evolution of what's already here.

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partycoder
Self-replicating computronium will make our definition of life even more
awkward. Probably we will even stop caring about what is alive and what is
not.

