I've wanted to build a self-reproducing machine since I was 17. It's forty-five years later, and it has finally become feasible. (I've done a few other things along the way.) I'm going to describe one such device, and speculate as to its larger implications. It's a pretty detailed design, which I had to come up with to convince myself that it is feasible. No doubt there are better designs than this.

The Autofac

Here's a top-level description of the device I'm thinking of. It's called an Autofac, which is what they were called in the earliest story about them. It looks like a little metal shed, about a meter cubed. It weighs about 50 kilograms. There's a little gnome-sized door on each end. It's full of robot arms and automated machine tools. It's connected to electricity and by WiFi to a data center somewhere. It has a front door, where it accepts material, and a back door, where it outputs useful objects, and cans of neatly packaged waste. You can communicate with it, to tell it to make parts and assemble them into useful shapes. It can do all the metalworking operations available to a machinist with a good shop at their disposal. In return, it occasionally asks for help or clarification.

One particular thing it can be told to make is another one of itself. This is of course the case we're all interested in. Here's what that looks like. You feed a 60kg package of steel castings, electronics, and other parts, into the door at one end. It starts by building another shed, next to the other end. The two sheds are butted up next to each other, so the rain can't get in. Once it's enclosed, there is no visible progress for about a month, but it makes various metalworking noises. Then it announces that it's done. The second shed is now another Autofac, and can be carried away to start the process elsewhere. There's also a can full of metal scrap and used lubricant, which has to be disposed of responsibly. This process can be repeated a number of times, at least seven, to produce more offspring. Eventually the original Autofac wears out, but by then it has hundreds of descendants.

The software

The key part of the Autofac, the part that kept it from being built before, is the AI that runs it. Present-day VLMs (vision-language models) are capa...

JaredSykes

JaredSykes