Can robot or a device be made that, given the requisite resources, could construct and assemble a functional copy of itself?

To entertain this hypothesis further, let’s add a set of explicit constraints or expectations:

  1. The copy must structurally match the original device as is realistically possible
  2. The device must be able to manufacture at least one copy of itself
  3. The overall replication process should sustain itself for an indefinite amount of iterations
  4. The device must not repurpose its own parts as parts for its copy
  5. The device must not peform any task other than replicating itself and preserving itself to be able to replicate
  6. The device may sustain damages of repairable or non-repairable nature as long as it obeys constraints 1 and 2
  7. The device may take as much time and resources as it needs to construct its copy as long as both remain finite
  8. The device may make use of essential external resources like electricity and cooling to sustain itself as long as its able to accommodate its copy to do the same

Can reproduction be emulated mechanically while obeying all the constraints above or is there a fundamental limitation stopping us from realising this concept? If so, what is it?

  • dewritoninja@pawb.social
    4·
    11 hours ago

    There is nothing fundamental that would stop you from creating the machine , but it would be a logistical Nightmare. The way we create robots depends entirely on a complex supply chain, you need Polymers, semiconductors, several types of alloys,rare earths, etc,.all of them coming from all over the world.

    This machine would essentially be an everything factory that is fully automated, making every single electric component , refining every gram of metal, etching every Silicon wafer into an integrated circuit, it would have to have a way of reaching every single mineral deposit needed and handle the transport of such material.

    The manufacturing of CPUs is already one of the most complex in the world , and fabs don’t have to worry about mining their own metals and synthesizing their own chemicals.

    This machine would have to be static due to the scale of production and would likely need to create it’s own drive workers for maintenance and resource gathering, so it would also have to have a way of creating and maintaining such workers.

    That’s of course assuming it would use the kind of technology we use. The kind of technology we’ve developed over Centuries which has been shaped by human culture, economics and biology.

    There’s probably hundreds of technologies that could be self replicated very efficiently but that people overlooked because getting copper from the other side of the world was more convenient.

    So I guess ultimately that would be the limiting factor, our machines are designed around us. You would need several radical designs that disregard decades of RnD