14 comments

  • virtualritz7 hours ago
    Read "The Invincible"[1] from Stanisław Lem.

    Particularly the chapter called "Lauda's hypothesis" about the evolution of the planet's 'necrosphere' of self-organizing insect-like machines.

    Curiously magnetism also plays a role in the book.

    It's from 1963.

    Lem was always eerily accurate with many of his futurist ideas. Even though he didn't want to be seen as a futurist but just as a sci-fi author.

    "Weapon systems of the 21st century"[2] is another one of those of his works. Written in 1986 it predicts satellite-mounted use of lasers and 'synsects' (synthetic insects) with swarm intelligence. It also predicts that powerful AI is not needed but (superior) swarm intelligence is enough for battlefield superiority.

    I dunno if the latter is even available in English but I guess nowadays you can just ask an LLM to translate the Polish original or the very good German translation to English, if you want to read it. :)

    [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible

    [2] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffensysteme_des_21._Jahrhu...

  • notjoemama1 hour ago
    When exactly will world leaders realize that this new wave of military research is risky enough to destroy them in their wealthy gated communities? Do they actually have to die and take a percentage of life on this planet with them before they can agree to some form of of altruistic peace agreement? Even if they have escape islands, I think too many people have seen Mad Max and that never ends well for the leaders.
    • istorical1 hour ago
      Current economic and political systems reward baseless confidence, believing you are better than others (and speaking and acting that way), and hubris.

      So maybe it makes sense that our political and economic leaders have false confidence that "everything will be fine, it always has been for me".

      • bilbo0s10 minutes ago
        I think they are more confident that most of the people in society believe in the same hubris. They can all point to some class of people that are lower than them. Don’t underestimate the power of that kind of motivation on the masses.

        The classes of people on the bottom are usually not numerous nor educated enough to cause a real issue. And if you get really lucky, the hierarchy is somewhat based in ethnicity. People will fight vehemently to support such structures.

        Taking advantage of these sorts of motivations has worked to organize and control human societies for millennia. There is absolutely no reason for elites to think it will fail now.

  • erulabs14 hours ago
    Extremely cool, but also terrifying. Anyone else read all the lore in the Horizon games? It was AI and nano-bot swarms that ended the world there, escaping from a research lab and consuming all organic matter on the surface of the earth. Once the nano bot swarm can build more nano bots…

    Still, think of the cool robots we’ll get just before the end!

  • 383toast40 minutes ago
    Seems like this would be a first step towards grey goo...
  • biomcgary17 hours ago
    Evidently someone is a fan of Big Hero 6.
  • sebmellen11 hours ago
    Has anyone here read Micro or Prey by Michael Crichton?

    > In the Nevada desert, an experiment has gone horribly wrong. A cloud of nanoparticles—micro-robots—has escaped from the laboratory. This cloud is self-sustaining and self-reproducing. It is intelligent and learns from experience. For all practical purposes, it is alive.

    • portaouflop10 hours ago
      Prey was so good, really entertaining read.

      I think that we are a long way from this level of nanobots - we don’t even have a regular robot that is somewhat self sustaining (e.g. charges itself with solar power) - so we probably won’t need to lose hair over this anytime soon…

    • Jerrrry1 hour ago
      I'm convinced Michael Crichton was the greatest sci-fi writer after Isaac Asimov.
  • jnichols353 hours ago
    If this technology keeps evolving, football[0] could get real interesting.

    [0] https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/

  • dsjoerg14 hours ago
    A more accurate (but less flashy) title might be: "Magnetically actuated swarm assemblies of mass-produced microrobots for task execution" This strips away the unnecessary anthropomorphism and focuses on what the system actually does.

    ===

    https://chatgpt.com/share/676e293f-f51c-8007-b07a-2cb9d89e9a...

    • ecosystem14 hours ago
      "Swarm intelligence" doesn't seem a very anthrocentric/anthromorphic concept and the swarm coordination across tasks is the interesting aspect of this paper. Do you think this claim is unfounded? (Edited: typo)
    • TJSomething11 hours ago
      I'm not sure they're really "actuated". They're definitely programmed by a smart magnet, and then powered by a dumb magnet.
  • dmje5 hours ago
    I can't see "bot" and "swarm" in the same sentence without thinking of Black Mirror and wondering how we went so obviously, terribly wrong
  • devmor16 hours ago
    Very interesting and cool experiments, but I feel like this is stretching the limits of the term "robot" beyond its useful definition, as does the usage of the word "intelligence" for what are assuredly complex little machines, but are ultimately useless without being directly manipulated by a magnet.
  • reynaldi13 hours ago
    If you can think it, the Microbots can do it. The only limit is your imagination. Microbots!
  • shiroiushi13 hours ago
    This sounds much like the "Replicators" from Stargate: SG1.