"Page0061" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bloom Howard - The Lucifer Principle (htm))

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a re the genes of today.  And the latest versions of those first primitive

protective suits are you and me.

There's another aspect to Dawkins replicators that helps explains

some of nature's more reprehensible habits.  Imagine a day in the

future when some clever engineer invents an entirely new industrial

process--a manufacturing technique that makes factories and workers

obsolete.  Under the new system, management committees that sit

around anxiously pondering the next profitable move are as useless as

last week's donuts.  The enormous stamping machines, pressing

devices and even welding robots are  unnecessary artifacts to be tossed

into museums and gawked at from time to time. What has replaced

them?

An ultra-miniaturized factory complete with a built-in blueprint

for its finished product.  The device is so small that you can fit millions

of them on a flyspeck and so inexpensive that a penny will buy you

more than you can count.

These little wonders have another advantage.  You can scatter

them at random.  They take care of the rest.  There's no more need to

spend billions digging metals out of the earth or cracking chemicals

from oil and turning them into plastics.  The automated mini-factories

find what they need without help, sensing the presence of unprocessed

industrial materials in a pile of garbage, a whiff of air, or a lump of dirt.

If they run across the necessary substances, they immediately go to

work assembling the finished goods.  If they don't discover what they

need, these little babies simply fail to activate.  A deactivated

mini-factory is no great loss.  After all, millions of the

micro-construction units can be turned out for the price of a stick of

gum.

When the new system becomes popular, however, it turns out to

have a glitch.  The scheme is too  successful.  Each product is cranked

out in a world overrun with other gizmos stamped out by the same

system.  What's more, each product of the mini-factories is

programmed to go out and gather the raw materials to make more

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a re the genes of today.  And the latest versions of those first primitive

protective suits are you and me.

There's another aspect to Dawkins replicators that helps explains

some of nature's more reprehensible habits.  Imagine a day in the

future when some clever engineer invents an entirely new industrial

process--a manufacturing technique that makes factories and workers

obsolete.  Under the new system, management committees that sit

around anxiously pondering the next profitable move are as useless as

last week's donuts.  The enormous stamping machines, pressing

devices and even welding robots are  unnecessary artifacts to be tossed

into museums and gawked at from time to time. What has replaced

them?

An ultra-miniaturized factory complete with a built-in blueprint

for its finished product.  The device is so small that you can fit millions

of them on a flyspeck and so inexpensive that a penny will buy you

more than you can count.

These little wonders have another advantage.  You can scatter

them at random.  They take care of the rest.  There's no more need to

spend billions digging metals out of the earth or cracking chemicals

from oil and turning them into plastics.  The automated mini-factories

find what they need without help, sensing the presence of unprocessed

industrial materials in a pile of garbage, a whiff of air, or a lump of dirt.

If they run across the necessary substances, they immediately go to

work assembling the finished goods.  If they don't discover what they

need, these little babies simply fail to activate.  A deactivated

mini-factory is no great loss.  After all, millions of the

micro-construction units can be turned out for the price of a stick of

gum.

When the new system becomes popular, however, it turns out to

have a glitch.  The scheme is too  successful.  Each product is cranked

out in a world overrun with other gizmos stamped out by the same

system.  What's more, each product of the mini-factories is

programmed to go out and gather the raw materials to make more