Story here. Should we be afraid? :eek:
Excerpt: "Robots are close to being able to replicate themselves. Machines are under development that can digest plants, like we do, heal themselves and even poo. Others are able to ‘breed’ just like the birds and the bees, albeit with a lot of human help to make their components. Now a team at the University of Bath, has come up with a machine that can will take the next step.
Trust me, it’s not as much fun as it sounds.
Nah. As of yet they are far too stupid to be all that dangerous. At least, we shouldn’t be afraid of any robot apocalypse scenarios from anything this dumb; the economic implications for perfected replicators would be massive, and potentially very negative to societies that refuse to adapt.
Other self-replicating robots, although in a slightly different sense to the “self-replication” in the OP.
Only there’s a misplaced decimal, so each generation is 1/10th the size of the last…
At first 
.
Then upon seeing the poster’s name :dubious:
I think it’s neat that they’re giving the thing away, and encouraging folks to share it with each other. It’d be cool if there was a way to track its spread - like, perhaps, by registering the product online before use - so we could see how quickly it catches on.
It technically can’t “build” itself.
It can fabricate all of its own parts except for a few pieces of simple hardware you can buy at a hardware store. But it can’t gather raw materials and it can’t assemble the parts after its made them.
When a robot can turn raw materials into a working copy of itself without human intervention … then you should worry.
Yup. It’s really just the 21st century version of the lathe in the sense that lathes are versatile production tools that can also be used to make their own parts.
It’s a shame they have to put all this crazy sci-fi spin on the device as 3D printers are nifty enough in their own right. We’ve got one at work that uses a standard inkjet printhead with the ink removed and glue fed into it. The glue is used to print a single 2D cross-section on a bin full of fine powder. When the layer’s “printed”, the bottom of the bin drops down a bit, and a new layer of powder is swept on top. That layer then gets printed with the next cross-section of the object being produced. When it’s done, you dig the object out of the unglued powder, and you’ve got a nice little prototype for whatever you’re working on.
Erasmus Darwin: Wow… I’m soo envious! That sounds ultra-cool!
Makes me think of Rocky Horror Picture Show – “In just seven days, I can make you a man!”
do they lock that thing up at night?
Well, I left out some of the gory details. Dealing with the powder that it builds the stuff out of is a bit of a pain in the butt. When the piece is done, it’s buried in the powder, so you have to carefully dig it out and wipe it down. Then you’ve got to manually tidy up the powder in the bins that the printer uses so it’s ready to print the next piece. Finally, if you want the piece to be more durable, you have to coat the outside surface with a superglue-like substance.
I did a quick search for one in action (we’ve got a Zprinter 310), and here’s what I came up with: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkPWnZWo2cc. It’s a little quick on showing it in action, but if you jump to the 2:10 mark, you should get a bit of an idea what it’s like.
What really amazes me though is that there are DIY/hobbyist 3D printers such as the RepRap in the original article and the Fab@Home project (which seems to be getting less attention).
Anyone ever read **Harry Harrison’s **How the Old World Died?
When they make one that can build itself out of chunks of us, then we need to worry.
And once you give them the ability to find and procure their necessary resources, then we have WWIII. 
This was the premise of Virus and Moontrap
You better make sure your Old Glory Insurance**policy is paid up…
**not the original SNL skit, a re-creation
Especially when it has four legs and a wet tongue. It’ll be after you for stuff all the time, and your home will never be quite the same (or quite as clean) again.
Explain to me why self-replicating robots are any more of a threat than, say, housecats. These machines aren’t nanites and we aren’t talking about (the thus far unproven possibility of) gray goo. It just isn’t scary.
I’m relieved that no one is alarmed. But then, maybe they’re counting on a sense of complacency. I have seen The Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey ya know.
Self-replicating housecats can only produce more housecats. An intelligent, self-replicating, machine can produce machines which are more suited to world domination. Opposable thumbs would be a start.
Intelligent, here, means something on the order of a cockroach, and the ability to self-replicate means precisely that: It doesn’t have the programming or the tools to go beyond its original design. The most useful thing it could reasonably do is make its own spare parts and do minor to moderate repairs on itself.