Hello This is the end of a long work day in your apartment in the early 2040s.
You decide that your work is done, get up from the table and, yawn, say ** "It's time to film!" ** . The house reacts to your cues. Tables are divided into hundreds of small sections that flow behind you and re-take the form of armchairs. The ** computer ** screen you are working on appears from the wall and extends to a flat projection screen. You relax on the couch with the remote control in your hands.
In a few seconds you move from complete office to home theater ... all in four walls. Who needs more than one room?
This is the dream of those working on "programmable material".
In his latest book on AI, Max Tegmark distinguishes between three different levels of computational complexity for the organism.
** Life 1.0 ** is a single-celled organism, like bacteria; here hardware can not be distinguished from the software. The behavior of bacteria is encoded in its DNA; they can not learn new things.
** Life 2.0 ** is where people live in a certain spectrum. We are more or less trapped with new equipment, but we can change our software by choosing different things, for example, Spanish, not Italian. As with memory management on your smartphone, your brain hardware will allow you to download only a limited number of data packets, but, at least theoretically, you can learn new behaviors without altering your basic genetic code.
** Life 3.0 ** is a step change: a creature that can change both equipment and software, such as feedback. Here's what Tegmark sees as a real artificial intelligence that can learn to change your own codebase, leading to an explosion of intelligence. Perhaps with the help of CRISPR and other gene editing methods we can use our ** "software" ** to change our "hardware".
Programmability extends this analogy to things in our world: what if your sofa can "learn" how to become a table? What if, instead of a Swiss army knife with dozens of tools, you have only one tool that will "know" how to be another instrument that may be needed, if necessary? In the crowded cities of the future, can I replace a house with one apartment? This will save space and, possibly, resources.
After all, even though it's a dream
But when designing and producing individual gadgets is a complex process, you can imagine that making things that can turn into many different objects can be very complicated. Professor Skylar Tibbits at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called it a 4D seal, and on the website of his research team, his own assembly lab states:
"We also identify key ingredients for self-assembly as a set of simple building blocks, energy and interaction that can be developed for virtually all materials and processing.Self-assembly promises to deliver breakthroughs in many disciplines: from biology to materials science, software, robotics, manufacturing, transportation, infrastructure, construction, ** art and even space research " **
Naturally, their design is still in its early stages, but the Sidang Mandiri Lab and other researchers are only studying the science fiction app we are discussing.
For example, there is a mobile assembly project of its own that is reminiscent of scary factories, 24/7 where mobile phones are assembled from three-dimensional devices without human or robotic intervention. The phones they produce may not be spread from the shelf like hot cakes, but if all you want is something that just works, it can significantly reduce production costs and automate more technical processes.
One of the major obstacles that need to be addressed when creating programmable problems is the choice of the right fundamental block. There is a very important balance. To make small details, you need to have things that are not too big for the material you create to be too dirty. This can make building blocks useless for certain apps - for example, if you want to create tools for good manipulation. With large parts it will be difficult to simulate a number of textures.On the other hand, if the parts are too small, other problems may arise.
Imagine an installation where every part is a small robot. You must contain the resources of the robot and its brain, or at least some signal generator and signal processor, all in one compact unit. Perhaps you can imagine that you can model a number of textures by changing the power of "connections" between individual units - your desk can be a little harder than your bed, which can be more fun.
The first step to creating such material is done by those who develop modular robots. There are many different groups working here, including MIT, Lausanne, and the University of Brussels.
In the latter configuration, a robot acts as a central decision maker, called a brain subdivision, but an additional robot can independently join the brain unit necessary to change the overall shape and structure of the system. Although the current system is only ten units, it is a proof of concept that controls can be governed by modular robotic systems; perhaps in the future, the same smaller version can be a Matter 3.0 component.
You can imagine that using a machine learning algorithm like a robot flock can negotiate barriers and respond more easily to a changing environment than a single robot.
Speaking of robotics, the ideal form of robot has been the subject of much talk. In fact, one of the biggest recent championships in robotics - ** "DARPA ** Robotics Challenge" - won by robot, who is able to adapt, surpasses ** ATLAS ** Boston Dynamics humanoid with the simple addition of wheels, allowing him to travel and walk.
Instead of making robots in humanoid form (which is sometimes useful), letting them flourish and take the ideal form to achieve what you have set them, it can be much more useful. This is especially true when responding to natural disasters, when expensive robots can still be more useful than humans, but the conditions can be very unpredictable, and adaptability is the key.
In the future, many futurists envision this as a small nanobot that will be able to build anything from raw materials. But you do not need something really indistinguishable from magic to be useful. Programability allows to react and adapt to the environment, it can be used in all types of industrial applications.
We were far from ordering our beds to turn into bikes. As in many technical ideas, it may turn out that traditional low-tech solutions are much more practical and cost-effective.