[extropy-chat] Why no assembler design?

[Alfio Puglisi]

On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, Hal Finney wrote:

>Are the components, the cables and bearings and such, manufactured
>separately and then attached to the work piece somehow, or are they
>built in place as the output product grows?  What is the assembler's
>environment, how are the raw materials provided to it, as well as power
>and control signals?  Is the assembler free floating or attached to a
>large solid surface?

I'm sure that the question has been debated to death somewhere else, but
if the components are small and simple enough, could they be produced
biotech-style (i.e., assembling some billions of identical molecules in a
dish via chemical reactions), and then the assembler built combining the
basic blocks? Or is this an unworkable approach?

Blocks like that could have unique markers on them, allowing the parts to
snap together in the right way. To accomodate for this, the design would
be complicated, and size increased to maybe 5x or 10x. Still, it wouldn't
be a bad first step.

Could it be possible to design an assembler using parts that can snap
together using unique marks, accepting maybe a 10x increase in size? It
wouldn't be a bad first step.

I suspect one needs a well-developed nano at home system just to
contemplate this scenario :-))

Ciao,
Alfio