[tt] mechanical generation (self-rep)

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/09/mechanical_generation.php


Reporter

Mechanical Generation

The unveiling of a 3-D printer that was built to build itself is hailed as a
step toward "Darwinian Marxism."

by Matthew Power • Posted September 23, 2008 12:25 PM

Photograph by FoAM.

A flyswatter, a coat hook, a pair of sandals — all were made from the same
unremarkable white plastic, the sort mass produced by the freighter-load in
Guangzhou or Taipei. At a glance they couldn't seem less significant. But
these simple objects were "printed" in extruded plastic by a machine called
RepRap. To its proponents, the machine may be as momentous as the Wright
Flyer or the Altair home computer. Some claim RepRap could end poverty and
halt global warming. This is because RepRap, which can be constructed for a
few hundred dollars and runs on open-source software, can make something far
more significant than flip-flops. It can build itself. Well, almost.

RepRap, short for "self-replicating rapid prototyper," is the brainchild of
Adrian Bowyer, a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University
of Bath, in England. In 2004 Bowyer realized that one use for a rapid
prototyper — a digital printer that builds 3-D objects out of extruded
plastic — would be to make its own parts. That idea led him to the work of
John von Neumann, the Hungarian mathematician who in the 1940s had posited a
"Universal Constructor": a theoretical machine that could build any object,
including itself.

Bowyer's first-generation RepRap, which looks like a space-age coffee table,
is called Darwin; he built it on the strength of a mere $40,000 grant from
the British government. With the exception of screws, a battery, a motor, and
grease, RepRap makes all its parts. In May the first RepRap built of parts
made by another RepRap was revealed at England's Cheltenham Science Festival.
Within minutes of its assembly, the copy was at work on a replica. Since
then, Bowyer says, he and his colleagues don't even know how many copies have
been made. At least 100 have been produced around the world, from Brazil to
Finland to Israel, and a lively web culture of users has sprung up around the
machines.  

Bowyer sees a key potential of the technology as the decentralization of all
industrial production, which, he argues, will create unlimited wealth. One
admirer compared its potential to "having a China on every desktop." And each
new generation of machines would evolve by what Bowyer calls artificial
selection. The resulting combination of economic equalization and
technological evolution could be "Darwinian Marxism," although it could mean
a future without intellectual property and no way to encourage innovation.
Bowyer isn't worried: "I realized if you've got a machine that copies itself,
you've got to give it away anyway, because as soon as one of them is out
there you've lost control over it."

Science fiction author and blogger Cory Doctorow sees great potential in the
distribution of low-cost production and the lack of control of knowledge.
"It's a feature, not a bug," he says. But others have found self-replicating
machines problematic: In a 1983 paper, Carl Sagan and William Newman posited
that if unleashed, exponentially replicating interstellar probes would devour
the galaxy in less than 2 million years. And there's the chance that all that
plastic will drown the world in junk.

Such visions of the future require a wholly self-reproducing machine,
however, and according to Terry Wohlers, a leading industry consultant in the
field of rapid product development, we aren't there yet. "It's an interesting
project, but a relatively small percentage of the parts are self-replicated,
and those are the easier ones," says Wohlers.

"A perfect universal constructor would self-copy and self-assemble, just like
a bacterium or a tulip," says Bowyer. But self-assembly, like fabricating its
own screws and batteries, was too complex a technical hurdle, so RepRap
relies on humans to do the assembling. Bowyer likens the relationship to the
symbiosis between insects and flowers. Indeed, a blurred line between
technology and biology suits Bowyer well. "Planet Earth has been covered with
machines that copy themselves for 3.5 billion years," he says. "When you look
at the way humans domesticate objects that copy themselves, it's inevitably
the case that we make them more compliant, we make them more productive, we
mold them to our own requirements."