Grey goo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo

by morazyx • 16 years ago

40 42 16 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

lopezka• 16 years ago

Reminds me of what humans are doing with this planet.

ErrantX• 16 years ago

I suppose ultimately it models any organism at its simplest level.

axiom• 16 years ago

This assumes that some artificial organism we construct would be more robust and efficient at self-replication than run-of-the-mill single celled organisms.

noodle• 16 years ago

i'd assume that we could build something smarter than run-of-the-mill single celled organisms, which would be the important thing.

kiba• 16 years ago

What about replicators escaping labs and evolving on their own?

Maybe we would have multiple species of replicators trying to outcompete each other.

asdflkj3• 16 years ago

What's wrong with that assumption? There are some efficient mechanisms that evolution hasn't invented because they could not be reached by a series of gradual refinements. The wheel has long been said to be one of them, but I guess now we know that that's not strictly true. But nature's wheels are all very small and are bound to remain small because of their purpose, even though many organisms could benefit from large wheels.

It's true that replication is evolution's specialty, but maybe the initial construction of grey goo would require some specialized environment that doesn't naturally occur. Nuclear bomb isn't so complicated that evolution couldn't figure it out, for example, but it didn't and won't anytime soon.

InclinedPlane2• 16 years ago

How useful is the wheel without roads? In terms of mpg efficiency, weight efficiency, and off-road capability, the wheel seems comparably less efficient than evolved legged locomotion. At least for the purposes that are more important for animals.

nl• 16 years ago

Nuclear bomb isn't so complicated that evolution couldn't figure it out, for example, but it didn't and won't anytime soon.

That's kinda true, but there was a natural nuclear reactor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor

Also, the Sun seems to work pretty well.

If course, neither of these evolved though biological mechanisms, though, but they did arise in a natural environment. I find it difficult to imagine circumstances under which evolution would "figure out" a nuclear bomb - ie, I'm agreeing with your point that evolution usually requires a series of gradual refinements rather than a big jump forward.

jamii• 16 years ago

According to a biologist friend, the biggest challenge in working with genetically modified organisms is keeping them alive. Even in a sterile lab they generally end up getting exterminated by native organisms.

Groxx• 16 years ago

Self-replicating-nanobot Earth-death final-state.

Things like this always make me think of Sam's Archive's "Geocide" page. Which, by the way, points out that this does not in fact bring about the destruction of the Earth: http://qntm.org/destroy

huma• 16 years ago

There's another site called "Exit Mundi" that has a lot of doomsday scenarios. In particular, the grey goo problem: http://www.exitmundi.nl/graygoo.htm

bryanh• 16 years ago

What a powerful concept. It really does boggle the mind.

michaelfairley• 16 years ago

Self-replicating machines of the macroscopic variety were originally described by mathematician John von Neumann, and are sometimes referred to as von Neumann machines.

I suppose their memory holds both code and data?

JeanPierre• 16 years ago

Well, von Neumann was John McCarthy's menthor, and McCarthy made LISP. There's no wonder why programming code (e.g. functions) in LISP is data, and why LISP is heavily used in AI.

gojomo2• 16 years ago

In a battle between Grey Goo and a Paperclip Maximizer, who wins?

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

dmoney2• 16 years ago

Grey goo. A grey goo unit just needs to produce more grey goo units. A paperclip maximizer needs to produce both paperclips and other paperclip maximizers. So the goo is more efficient.

gojomo2• 16 years ago

But the Paperclip Maximizer is smarter!

JulianMorrison2• 16 years ago

Depends who starts the game first. The P.M. would subvert the goo, if it got a chance. A running goo swarm might be hard to subvert, though, being very distributed. I suspect the P.M. would take off and nuke it from orbit.

techiferous• 16 years ago

"They might be "superior" in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable."

A good reminder for businesses. If your only goal is to dominate the market, it is not a worthy goal.

dbz• 16 years ago

No one may find this interesting, but in virtual worlds, this is a very big problem. For example, in Second Life, if a bug report/ticket contains the terms "Grey Goo" (or) "Gray Goo" it is immediately taken care of. To the point where, if you are a worker who can handle it, you will be given a phone call and you must drive to your office immediately- it doesn't matter what else you are doing. Grey Goo can destroy a server in a matter of seconds.

asdflkj3• 16 years ago

Presumably they have automatic safeguards against it, and these emergencies occur when somebody outsmarts them. I wonder if this can be generalized to an interesting theory--how do you prevent all-consuming self-replicating behavior in a system with minimal intervention otherwise? Is this question even meaningful?

m_eiman2• 16 years ago

It should be pretty easy: keep track of the ancestry of each object and kill off any family tree that's expanding too quickly if the server gets overloaded.

stretchwithme2• 16 years ago

There are all kinds of disastrous applications of technology waiting for us.

like an microorganism or device designed to impregnate every women on the planet

or maybe people will start modifying their offspring to worship them

my personal favorite are tiny robots that interfere with the unjust use of force worldwide, causing the collapse of most governments

m_eiman2• 16 years ago

The last one will never happen, since it's the government that defines "just".

stretchwithme2• 16 years ago

No, its whoever invents such a technology that will define it. :-)

thunk3• 16 years ago

Drexler thinks it's nonsense:

http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/indepth/19648

jessriedel4• 16 years ago

No, Drexler doesn't think it's nonsense. He just thinks that it will be unnecessary to make replicators for the manufacturing purposes he has in mind. He says

>In particular, it turns out that developing manufacturing systems that use tiny, self-replicating machines would be needlessly inefficient and complicated. The simpler, more efficient, and more obviously safe approach is to make nanoscale tools and put them together in factories big enough to make what you want.

(note that he explicitly acknowledges the safety risk) and

>The popular version of the grey-goo idea seems to be that nanotechnology is dangerous because it means building tiny self-replicating robots that could accidentally run away, multiply and eat the world. But there’s no need to build anything remotely resembling a runaway replicator, which would be a pointless and difficult engineering task. I worry instead about simpler, more dangerous things that powerful groups might build deliberately - products like cheap, abundant, high-performance weapons with a billion processors in the guidance systems.

This does nothing to diminish the risk of replicators if they are, in fact, created. And there are all sort of possible problems where replicators would be essential. For example, we may want to release replicators into the environment to clean up certain kinds of pollution which can't be easily brought to a central facility.

thunk3• 16 years ago

That's like saying, "This does nothing to diminish the risk of a Moon-based Turbo Death Ray if one is, in fact, created." We might be able to make one if we tried really hard. But it would be pointless and difficult, and there are so many more pedestrian failure modes that it seems pointless to worry about it.

Drexler thinks we underestimate the difficulty of building run-away replicators. Nature's had 4 billion years and hasn't managed it. Yes, I'm aware of the wheel argument.

JulianMorrison2• 16 years ago

It's going to need a power source external to what it eats. Contrast: there already is grey goo built to work on local (not transmitted) energy, and it's called bacteria. It doesn't eat the world, because local energy isn't really that abundant relative to the cost of carrying around the means to utilize it.

Grey goo

Related Stories