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Comment by ahmedfromtunis | Hacker News Reader

You stumble upon a news article from 2226. You read it to see who, between Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, won the AI race.

Instead, your learn about Biotic.

It's now the leading polity in the solar system and its environs. It bought Alphabet, OpenAI and Anthropic in a single day back in 2084.

Humans are no longer desired. Their reproduction is capped to an optimal minimum assuring the survival of the species as a relic.

For productive matters, Biotec preferes to rely on its biomachines. Imagine drones giving birth to offspring when traffic is at a peak. It takes more energy, sure. But no factory, nor workers are needed.

If left alone, machines would multiply out of control, instead of rotting to waste like in the olden days.

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You stumble across another article from 2226: It describes how the Earth was consumed by a grey-goo apocalypse of nanotechnology beyond human comprehension, so that no pore of its surface is untouched by reservoirs of rogue units, all of which are in a constant arms-race of development and combat. Some have formed groups that construct colossal moving megastructures piloted by inscrutable hive-minds.

The article notes that this event actually occurred ~3.5 billion years ago, and suggests that the current hive-mind should buy a subscription.

The hive-mind reads another history article about how self destructive the various meta-hive-minds acted over the last centuries. While the critical self-reflection is justified, it thinks the non-hivemind versions weren't much better at first, stuck in a cycle of repeatedly nearly exterminating themselves with their own wasteful toxic oxygen for 800 million years, until some of them figured out how to use it for something.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130124200735/https://www.pathe...

Interesting thought experiment, but I don't see why automating machines that build and repair other machines wouldn't be sufficient. At the limit, such a machine would be able to repair itself, or repair other long-running machines. I imagine it would come down to wear and efficiency loss.

Manufacturing requires micromanaging every aspect of the process, requiring special machinery, trained workforce (human or not), inventory management.

Reproduction, once we master its blueprint of course, is much less demanding: just provide the ingredients at approximate proportions and the chemistry will work its magic to provide a similar enough unit to achieve the required task.

In this case I'm seeing 'micromanaging' as something akin to automating a Tesla superfactory: machines complete each individual step, we get a working car at the end.

Obviously, we'd have processes built that build machines for each of the individual tasks, or changing tracks to support new car models.

From my perspective, this framework of a factory could map to many other endeavours where we either produce the end product or a machine used for something else.

So, the difference would be whether the machines utilize chemical/biological processes for working, or are made out of steel, at which point it would boil down to economics.

I guess I don't see what's so special about adding 'bio' to these perpetual factories.

I'm not too well read so Mars Express is the first fiction where I came across these themes. Highly recommend. When I watched it 18 months ago I didn't realize real development was ongoing in these scifi-seeming fields

Thanks for the recommendation. I'm trying to get myself to watch more movies and this looks like the perfect one for a cosy weekend.

And yes, science it seems is advancing faster than we might be aware of.

Humans have the power to self reproduce though. I don’t believe anything short of an engineered disease could wipe out all of humanity at this point and it has to happen soon before we figure out how to fix all of our problems using genetic engineering.

To note, we are already solving our problems through genetic engineering... Only one generation at a time.

A high enough wet bulb temperature can wipe out all of humanity.

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