Submitted by Secure-Name-4116 t3_xtr3wt in singularity
Do you think at some point, technology will advance to the point of imitating biology? Machines made out of proteins and enzymes instead of metal and plastic, and powered by lipids and carbohydrates instead of fossil fuels and electricity would be much cheaper to build than what we have now if the tech for it existed, right?
I think nanotechnology will be cool, but not as cool as in science fiction (it's not magic after all, it's technology). Universal constructors will be slow (to not overheat by the insane amount of computations required to place individual atoms). The usual manufacturing process will begin with engineering of an energy efficient specialized constructor, then more or less slow construction of the specialized constructor, and then the constructor will churn out the requested goods.
The entire process will, of course, be automated, but if you need something truly unique or if you are bootstrapping extraterrestrial habitat, you'll need to wait.
[deleted]
This kind of technology will enable small groups or even individuals to be entirely self-sufficient so long as raw materials and energy are available for the products. The moment a technology like this becomes available, I'm building a rocket and moving to the moon or Mars. I think Earth will be just too chaotic for a while. Ultimately, I'll probably go into suspended animation and have my automated star ship seek out a suitable planet for terraforming someplace else in the galaxy.
i think a lot of hyper intelligent entities may spend a lot of time in various forms of "sleep". then maybe less expensive entities (maybe a bit above human level intelligences) act as their guard dogs.
I’ve thought for a while that proteins may be a major route into nanoscale robots. There’s orders of magnitude more potential proteins possible from just the 20 amino acids nature uses to make all of life. Then there’s all the unconsidered possible amino acids we could engineer ourselves
Cyberware is what comes to mind when most people think about the future but you are describing bioware. Bioware is the organic version of cybernetic enhancements.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/aelm.201900202
liquid cybernetics for zettascale
It's usually called wetware. Maybe bioware would be a more appropriate name but that's not the term by which you'd find relevant material (like content about the things I linked).
Have you researched it for just a little bit? See e.g.:
[deleted]
If biological mechanisms such as brains or muscles truly are more efficient than other mechanisms then technology will shift towards trying to mimic it. At the moment we have lots of evidence to suggest this is the case for example your eyes, brain, heart are all extremely efficient for their size and can last decades running on very little fuel (food).
Maybe they aren’t more efficient but humans just chose to be biological for no reason
agonypants t1_iqregu9 wrote
What you're describing is often referred to as "molecular nanotechnology" (MNT) or "atomically precise manufacturing" (APM). Yes, technology is headed in that direction and I hope that with the arrival of strong artificial intelligence, these kinds of molecular factories can be developed quickly. While I think that a mature APM won't resemble biology very closely, I do think that the molecular-scale mechanics of biology can be used to bootstrap our way toward those more mature machines.
I strongly recommend looking into the writings of Drexler and Feynmann on this topic. While I've been reading about this potential tech since the 1980s, my first real introduction to the concept was via the book, "Nano!" by Ed Regis. The key for me was realizing the parallels between biology and nanotechnology. One can think of a cow as a "machine" for transforming grass and water into beef. While the concept of nanotech is not exactly akin to biology, it should be capable of similar products. While a theoretical APM box should be capable of making beef, it should just as easily be capable of making anything else we can model at the atomic or molecular scale - computers, televisions, clothing, solar panels, housing and construction materials, food, robots, etc. - quite literally anything we can imagine. But instead of "growing" these products over a period of months, the directed machinery of a mature APM could crank these products out in a matter of minutes or hours.
It's a really exciting topic and I'm sorry to see it's not as widely discussed as it should be. It is the ultimate in technology and it's one that will completely transform the world - likely the entire solar system and beyond.