When I started reading this, I was hoping "universal fabricators" meant just that. While I'm a longtime proponent of molecular nanotechnology,* it was disappointing to see that the "universal fabricators" of the title are protein-based, so at best a very distant prospect.
Sincere good luck with the idea; I'd think of working with tubulin and actin and associated proteins at first. No doubt you're keeping apace of the exiting advances in molecular simulation better than I.
**Real Universal Fabricators**
A colleague and I have been working on "seed factories" for several years. The concept started at NASA in the '80s as a proposal to create an automated quasi-self-reproducing industrial base on the Moon with minimum launch-mass, using local materials as much as possible and importing as little as possible from Earth.
The idea shifted to trying it on Earth first. This also proved hard to design, let alone fund, still less implement. Now one of us has lowered his sights to something like a makerspace, while my vision is still more like an economy in a (small town-sized) box, but organized as an economy, rather than a single mechanical system, with an internal currency based on sole proprietors and small partnerships swapping time on each others' equipment. This multiplies the effective access to real capital (productive machinery) of the participants, and effectively backs the currency directly with the use of that real capital. Since the system as a whole can produce more machines, and more varieties of more specialized and productive machines, whose use backs the currency (*is* the currency), and these new machines are bought with loans made in the currency and payable in the currency ... well you can see where I'm going. It would take at least a few pages to effectively say much more. It needn't be very automated, but it would be desirable, of course; if it is automated it's essential to keep the ownership broadly distributed as described above or there will be no broad market for the products produced when wages are not paid due to wage labor having being automated away. Much of my plan is how to use organic market mechanisms to naturally prevent over-concentration and maintan a healthy free market.
The principal practical product of the work has been a carefully-selected 18,000 volume electronic library focusing mainly on science and technology, particularly manufacturing technology. Although it's well-organized and cataloged, getting the 150GB of PDFs properly parsed and tokenized for AI training and retrieval is surprisingly expensive and difficult, particularly tables, charts, figures, equations, all sorts of meaningful formatting, and older works. Once it is AI-usable, then additional training will be needed to get it understood well enough to apply practically, but then it will be a key utility in the next industrial revolution.
*I kept Dexler's book *Nanosystems* on my bedside table for years, re-reading it many times, and decades ago coached an award-winning invention contest team in nanotechnology (utility fog for "holodeck" education) and then another on networked labs-on-chips biodefense/planetary immune system (original idea from one of the 10-year olds on the first team).
I try to keep up, but what happened to the tried-an-true define on first occurrence (DOFO) convention [I made that up] for readers who are interested but maybe not in your discipline?
Gemini assures me that BBN means Bottlebrush Network in the context of this post’s title... I have my doubts. Big Brother Naija (a Nigerian reality show), probably not. Bayesian Belief Network (in AI), maybe? Looks good. Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (in cosmology), Naa... Big Blue Nation (UK), nope... BBN Technologies (Raytheon)? ... "Bye Bye Now" ?
I’ll settle on Better Business Network (BBN) for now, read further in the post and see if it becomes more clear....
[Much later] Oh, I see in a note, that whatever BBN means it is the same, almost, as “Frontier Research Contractors” (FRCs). Got it!
I added a small statement in the first paragraph addressing this. Your comment reminded me to do so. Thank you. The context on why it wasn't there initially is that we are in the middle of a FreakTakes series entirely focused on BBNs. Most of the readers have heard me introduce the concept several times in recent weeks, so I kind of skipped passed it as most returning readers have context. But I went back and added a flag so that people who are curious can just click on it and dive in. Your comment helped me remember to do so.
When I started reading this, I was hoping "universal fabricators" meant just that. While I'm a longtime proponent of molecular nanotechnology,* it was disappointing to see that the "universal fabricators" of the title are protein-based, so at best a very distant prospect.
Sincere good luck with the idea; I'd think of working with tubulin and actin and associated proteins at first. No doubt you're keeping apace of the exiting advances in molecular simulation better than I.
**Real Universal Fabricators**
A colleague and I have been working on "seed factories" for several years. The concept started at NASA in the '80s as a proposal to create an automated quasi-self-reproducing industrial base on the Moon with minimum launch-mass, using local materials as much as possible and importing as little as possible from Earth.
The idea shifted to trying it on Earth first. This also proved hard to design, let alone fund, still less implement. Now one of us has lowered his sights to something like a makerspace, while my vision is still more like an economy in a (small town-sized) box, but organized as an economy, rather than a single mechanical system, with an internal currency based on sole proprietors and small partnerships swapping time on each others' equipment. This multiplies the effective access to real capital (productive machinery) of the participants, and effectively backs the currency directly with the use of that real capital. Since the system as a whole can produce more machines, and more varieties of more specialized and productive machines, whose use backs the currency (*is* the currency), and these new machines are bought with loans made in the currency and payable in the currency ... well you can see where I'm going. It would take at least a few pages to effectively say much more. It needn't be very automated, but it would be desirable, of course; if it is automated it's essential to keep the ownership broadly distributed as described above or there will be no broad market for the products produced when wages are not paid due to wage labor having being automated away. Much of my plan is how to use organic market mechanisms to naturally prevent over-concentration and maintan a healthy free market.
The principal practical product of the work has been a carefully-selected 18,000 volume electronic library focusing mainly on science and technology, particularly manufacturing technology. Although it's well-organized and cataloged, getting the 150GB of PDFs properly parsed and tokenized for AI training and retrieval is surprisingly expensive and difficult, particularly tables, charts, figures, equations, all sorts of meaningful formatting, and older works. Once it is AI-usable, then additional training will be needed to get it understood well enough to apply practically, but then it will be a key utility in the next industrial revolution.
*I kept Dexler's book *Nanosystems* on my bedside table for years, re-reading it many times, and decades ago coached an award-winning invention contest team in nanotechnology (utility fog for "holodeck" education) and then another on networked labs-on-chips biodefense/planetary immune system (original idea from one of the 10-year olds on the first team).
Thanx for the posts! Much appreciated.
But... What means BBN?
I try to keep up, but what happened to the tried-an-true define on first occurrence (DOFO) convention [I made that up] for readers who are interested but maybe not in your discipline?
Gemini assures me that BBN means Bottlebrush Network in the context of this post’s title... I have my doubts. Big Brother Naija (a Nigerian reality show), probably not. Bayesian Belief Network (in AI), maybe? Looks good. Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (in cosmology), Naa... Big Blue Nation (UK), nope... BBN Technologies (Raytheon)? ... "Bye Bye Now" ?
I’ll settle on Better Business Network (BBN) for now, read further in the post and see if it becomes more clear....
[Much later] Oh, I see in a note, that whatever BBN means it is the same, almost, as “Frontier Research Contractors” (FRCs). Got it!
Cheers,
I added a small statement in the first paragraph addressing this. Your comment reminded me to do so. Thank you. The context on why it wasn't there initially is that we are in the middle of a FreakTakes series entirely focused on BBNs. Most of the readers have heard me introduce the concept several times in recent weeks, so I kind of skipped passed it as most returning readers have context. But I went back and added a flag so that people who are curious can just click on it and dive in. Your comment helped me remember to do so.