[Hplusroadmap] Artificial Body

Tue Feb 19 13:03:10 CST 2008

I believe the future is edging away from artificial body parts and
closer towards engineered and grown parts, which brings into question
the reliability of Prof. Endy's biosecurity field. How accurate is
biosecurity if eventually we are able to grow new fingerprints or
corneas? We will have to rely solely on the ethics of practicing
surgeons to prevent people from changing identifying markings at will.
As a fiction writer, I develop characters that are ethically challenged,
but I know people like that exist in all walks of life, including
surgeons.

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Today's Topics:

   1. Artificial Body (ameluti at gmail.com)
   2. Re: Artificial Body (nvitamore at austin.rr.com)
   3.  von Neumann Universal Constructor Prize (Bryan Bishop)
   4. Re: Artificial Body (Chris Caston)
   5. Edge 237 - Drew Endy: Engineering Biology (Jef Allbright)

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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:06:36 +0000
From: ameluti at gmail.com
Subject: [Hplusroadmap] Artificial Body
To: "Transhumanist Technical Roadmap" <hplusroadmap at heybryan.org>
Message-ID:
	<673563400802181306t316808ccr5b154d45fbf28e5b at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

I searched around and haven't found it in our wiki, so I thought that
perhaps a nice addition would be a comprehensive list of links and
materials
on artificial body parts, eg muscles, bones, organs etc. As creating a
more
durable and efficient body is one of the goals of transhumanism, it
would be
nice to know where we are in terms of current research and what hurdles
we
need to overcome to move forward.
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Message: 2
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:22:16 -0500
From: "nvitamore at austin.rr.com" <nvitamore at austin.rr.com>
Subject: Re: [Hplusroadmap] Artificial Body
To: hplusroadmap at heybryan.org
Message-ID: <380-220082118212216318 at M2W038.mail2web.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

From:  ameluti at gmail.com

>I searched around and haven't found it in our wiki, so I thought that
perhaps a nice addition would be a comprehensive list of links and
materials
on artificial body parts, eg muscles, bones, organs etc. As creating a
more
durable and efficient body is one of the goals of transhumanism, it
would be
nice to know where we are in terms of current research and what hurdles
we
need to overcome to move forward.<

I designed the prototype future body.  This design has been featured in
books, magazines, newspapers, televised documentaries, etc. since 1997. 
It's structure is based on research of emergent technologies.

My papers, prsented in universities internationally, contained heavily
researched data concerning the future body.

Best wishes,

Natasha Vita-More
http://www.natasha.cc

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Message: 3
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:55:17 -0600
From: Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com>
Subject: [Hplusroadmap]  von Neumann Universal Constructor Prize
To: Transhumanist Technical Roadmap <hplusroadmap at heybryan.org>
Message-ID: <200802182255.17243.kanzure at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;  charset="us-ascii"

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~douglasr/prize/
douglas.reay at gmail.com
(by way of David Dalrymple)

See also:
http://heybryan.org/projects/atoms/

The von Neumann Universal Constructor Prize
I'm looking for experts to sit on a prize comittee. 

And then I'm looking for some person, group or institution to fund the 
prize. 

What prize? 

Let me start at the beginning, with a brief review of current 
technology. 

Self Assembly
Robots used for assembly are a standard part of industry. Assembling the

robots themselves, though, is a tricky task that has always required a 
measure of human intervention. Simpler robots, though, can be designed 
with automated assembly in mind, made up of small pieces that snap 
together, such as Lego Mindstorms. 

Hod Lipson of Cornell University demonstrated practical self-assembly 
using towers of cubes attached to each other by magnets. Matt Moses at 
the University of New Mexico has taken this further, using Lego-like 
bricks to make a three-axis manipulator that can assemble a duplicate 
of itself, given the components. (As described in his thesis: A 
Physical Prototype of a Self-Replicating Universal Constructor) 

Teams have competed to achieve a similar task with commercially 
available Lego. 

Self Replication
The Replicating Rapid Prototyper Project has reached its first milestone

of a machine able to manufacture most of the components needed to build 
a working copy of itself. Full self replication is the eventual aim, 
but partial self replication is also valuable, as it reduces the cost 
of such machines. Under the 90 % rule, the aim is to get the price of 
the purchased components below 10 % of the cost of a full commercial 
machine. Similarly, it is desirable to self manafacture at least 90 % 
of the parts, that make up 90 % of the mass and volume of the machine. 
As applied to assembly, the 90 % rule would dictate as a first stage 
that you would aim to cut down the amount of human intervention 
required by a factor of 10. 

Universal Constructor
A von Neumann Universal Constructor both replicates the parts of the 
machine and assembles them into a working duplicate. No one has yet 
made a physical example of one that starts from raw materials, although 
there have been outline designs for a Self-Replicating Robotic Lunar 
Factory since 1980. 

However one can envisage how such a system would be possible, if the 
work on self assembly and self replication could be brought together. 
And, as it happens, they are not too far apart. Lego pieces have been 
fabricated using rapid prototyping machines. And rapid prototyping 
machines have been constructed from Lego. Indeed people working on 
RepRap itself have made good use of Lego while bootstrapping to their 
current design. 

The Prize
So what needs to be done to bring these two things together? 

Show that 90 % of a self assembling robotic system can be fabricated 
using a rapid prototyping system that can also self replicate
Show that 90 % of the assembly from parts of a rapid prototyping system 
can be done by a robotic system that can also self assemble.

To this end, I propose that a prize be set up, to engage the imagination

and spur progress. Said prize should be awarded in stages as well 
defined milestones on the path to this aim are reached, with a panel of 
experts judging when a submision has met the criteria. (Possibly on the 
model of the Ansari X Prize.) 

I shall be soliciting feedback on this idea before making a more general

publication of it. However, if you have come across this website and 
have ideas on prize criteria, feasibility of the aims, selection 
process for the panel or suggestions on funding, please contact me.

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/

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Message: 4
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:07:27 +0900
From: "Chris Caston" <caston at arach.net.au>
Subject: Re: [Hplusroadmap] Artificial Body
To: <nvitamore at austin.rr.com>,	"Transhumanist Technical Roadmap"
	<hplusroadmap at heybryan.org>
Message-ID: <3627CAFD397C494793BCC0564A9F7610 at ChrisPC>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
	reply-type=original

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <nvitamore at austin.rr.com>
To: <hplusroadmap at heybryan.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 6:22 AM
Subject: Re: [Hplusroadmap] Artificial Body

Sounds excellent. Where can we get more information?

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Message: 5
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2008 08:35:46 -0800
From: "Jef Allbright" <jef at jefallbright.net>
Subject: [Hplusroadmap] Edge 237 - Drew Endy: Engineering Biology
To: "Transhumanist Technical Roadmap" <hplusroadmap at heybryan.org>
Message-ID:
	<f7bfe5740802190835h5a15e250y212e3ef6980db2b8 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

FYI:

<http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge237.html>

The only thing that hasn't been engineered are the living things,
ourselves. Again, what's the consequence of doing that at scale?
Biotechnology is 30 years old; it's a young adult. Most of the work is
still to come, but how do we actually do it? Let's not talk about it,
let's actually go do it, and then let's deal with the consequences in
terms of how this is going to change ourselves, how the biosecurity
framework needs to recognize that it's not going to be nation-state
driven work necessarily, how an ownership sharing and innovation
framework needs to be developed that moves beyond patent-based
intellectual property and recognizes that the information defining the
genetic material's going to be more important than the stuff itself
and so you might transition away from patents to copyright and so on
and so forth.

ENGINEERING BIOLOGY
A Talk with Drew Endy

EDGE VIDEO

DREW ENDY, is Assistant Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT,
where he is working to enable the design and construction of large
scale integrated biological systems, and to develop and improve
general methods for representing cellular behavior.

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