There's a heart wrenching story by Ray Bradbury about a totally automatic house that survived a nuclear war and keeps working even tough it's owners died
Fantastic story. It was in my 8th grade English lit book, and the teacher specifically made sure we covered it as they knew I was into sci-fi. They let me borrow Canticle for Leibowiez and a few years later let me borrow Stranger in a Strange Land (I was in a very small rural high school that was 6th through 12th grade and they were one of only two English teachers in the school)
I'd argue that the biggest hurdle to self-healing materials and self-repairing devices is the current consumerist direction towards making everything short-lived and disposable.
For a large portion of the things we need, 'self-repairing' and 'automatic replacement' would be functionally identical... reference the video's examples of roof tiles replaced by drones, pencils being shipped out because the stock in the house was low.
@@the_Carthaginian1 The difference is in that we want things to be replaced whenever it is logistically more viable for them to be replaceable than repairable/self-repairing. This is the idealistic scenario imagined in the video. In reality, driven by profit, companies artificially make it harder to repair some things, while making it more expensive to replace them, because it is left as the only option, and at the same time more energy and resources are wasted than could've been.
I love that the origin story for the biggest menace in four different galaxies is "Robotic teenager wanted more Lego sets, so she taught the blocks how to eat and reproduce."
It isn't design obsolescence, but you did hear the cause in the video, "why put a system that lasts for 30 years in a cabinet that will only last 10-15 years?" They know OSs will need to get bigger, they know people want a better system, they know software engineering will always ignore the existence of other programs, and so on. They aren't going to put a more expensive camera people won't use knowing that a newer one will be cheaper and better down the road, they won't put in more storage since it will be cheaper in the future, and so on and so on.
It's doable, but way harder than it should be, and the prevalence of Internet connectivity being required for anything labelled "smart" has me dumping out a big bucket of "Nope!" whenever I run across something with the label attached to it. Keep it simple, keep it dumb, and keep it off the Internet, lest you get bitten in the bum by the resulting privacy and security issues.
I for one hope to see self-repairing machines in my life time. Especially since some of the machines I have worked with are such pains in the butt to service. A fantastic episode as always, Isaac.
Thanks CF, I have to go rip a spindle out of my mower in a bit, and it's literally the 8th time this month I've had to take that deck off, so self-maintaining machines is definitely on my wish list right now too :)
First issue would be to have machines that are repairable...period. A lot of companies would prefer you buy a new product, rather than keep the old one for a few years.
I have the feeling that quite a few of the rich, including some corporate executives of said companies would a house like described for the simple reason they would have to interact less with 'normal' people. Of course the profit would be in the subscription service to keep the software up-to-date.
The big thing there would be developing any form of interplanetary or beyond travel. After all, things become a lot harder to excuse with 'just make sure you have a spare and buy a replacement when you can' when a ship might be weeks, if not months away from the nearest place they can acquire said replacement from. After several major loss of life incidents and disasters that occur due to this, they're going to have to make the change for the space assets. After which you are going to have a lot of people complaining about why *those* folks can do this but *we* can't. Which means it'll spread to planetside populations as well. Though I have a feeling it's going to be paired with major efforts to make having 'old fashioned' items be shameful and the like, so even if you can repair it the planetside populations don't want to unless they're 'odd'. Or put another way, the reason things stopped being designed for repairs is because suddenly you could very easily get a replacement into the hands of those who need it, so it was no longer a case of 'wait weeks for a replacement or spend a couple of days repairing it, maybe a week or two if you need to get replace a part of it rather than the whole thing'. Sure, people complain about it but they still buy because they can.
@@SkyHawk2137 said repair troubles are mostly artificial, just watch Louis Rossmann for details, chips that errase themselves if removed from hardware, software pairings, contracts made to prevent providers from selling stuff to third party repair, software tools to prevent repair (the part is installed, but the calibration is off, only to be denied by the contractor), and enough lawyer power to disable a Borg cube with sues, lobying, etc.
@@Dreamfox-df6bg Honestly, you could probably sell a house like that with software updates that you have to pay for individually as opposed to by subscription. And if you have enough, you could sell it for a decently low price, or just make the upgrade impressive... Hopefully it'll be either a decently ethical (by comparison to most businesses of course... you know, like [INSERT GOOD EXAMPLE]) company, a federally discounted product, or from a company that's hemorrhaging money from one facet while making money through another like Amazon and AWS, lmao.
Lol its fun being a self repairing machine watching about self repairing machines, The most amazing thing about these technologies is that self healing implies that the technology itself has tons of more aplications than juat healing. Self healing roads could maybe acts as water pipers filtering and purifying water to repair themselves and provide water, maybe even mining soil so old roads that arnt in use can become valuable ore. You could have sinple structures that rely on ecology to do the work by learning to understand animal and plant behaviors and grow and adapt to make them do usful things for us. Crazy stuff to see how these things will all come together
Nice, I'll have to borrow that if I can remember it. I tried to explain it to my kids the other say and it wandered off into what minotaurs were, and when I switched to Grandpa's axe, Boy 1 asked if he could chop firewood and Boy 2 got confused trying to figure out why he didn't get a chainsaw, so the point of the story got a bit lost. Toaster might work better, its mundane.
I've been watching for the better part of a decade and I am pleased to say I have never not enjoyed what I have watched here. Thanks for all the wonderful brain candy.
Given the sheer amount of money spent yearly rebuilding roads, the inventor of self-repairing roads will be given concrete shoes in rather short order.
About all those road repairs...We know that US city and state governments basically ignore zoning and transportation planning that isn't based around the entire population using cars/trucks for almost all movement and commerce. (This was started and promoted by auto and oil companies, of course.) With almost all things reliant on transport with tires, inertia does most of the work to keep our cities and transportation larping the mid 20th century. So, yeah. Road repairs, because every transport is an automobile travel road and they all get tons of use, and nothing important to you is within a safe 15 minute walk or safe 15 minute public transit from where you live (unless you're in a tiny handful of US cities).
I'm gonna send this to my landlady just for the intro. XD and my mom and aunts!!!!! I'd love a system like this. I'm perpetually messy and disorganized!
I think that will probably change in the far future to some extent, if you are on a 20 year journey to a new star planned obsolescence won't work. Or if you are out it the Ort cloud, companies probably won't be able to give you that years newest iPhone.
To add my own thought to this, I have a feeling that living longer could also somewhat encourage moving towards self repair Like at a certain point, super-long lived people probably wouldn't want you to keep shoving rapid-fire updates and replacements in their faces, and would not only get fed up and start wanting the stuff they're already comfortable with to last longer, their numbers would more easily build to a point where they have increasingly more sway over how they want things to be done. @@neooblisk0084
If the modern market produced a machine with autodiagnostic capability, then it would 1.) Only be available as a subscription service. 2.) Be actively manipulated, skewed, and monitored by the company to increase profit.
5:15 It seems like the logic that most builders and homeowners actually use mostly is "when this stuff breaks, hopefully I'll be in another house and this will be someone else's problem" The average American homeowner moves every 15 years
As an engineer I thought i’d weigh in. What you are talking about here is Reactive maintenance, waiting for things to break then fixing them. It’s been the norm in many industries for a while to do Predictive maintenance, calculating when something will fail and replacing it early. You are likely familiar with this already in getting your car serviced. Often the better approach still is to simply over engineer something to last until it will likely be obsolete before it breaks. You don’t see either approach with most consumer stuff yet because it has to be made from incredibly cheap components to make it profitable at the prices people expect. And its not worth the manufacturers time to provide mean time to failure data for a 10c part.
I feel like I've refrained from talking about this -(in some cases due to how promising of a market this looks like lol),- but these things just seem like they're fascinatingly underrated in the public sphere. These are actually some of my favorite videos, because (near-futurism, that is) seems like it's, for obvious reasons: 1. The most directly useful to my future field of engineering. 2. Giving me *_great_* ideas for better world-building in my personal fictional writing and for future passion projects. 3. Helps me peek into what should be thought of in near-future political, economic, and even philosophical study and discussion for logistic and other purposes. Keep being one of my faves, guys! 👏🏾
One of the things I find most fascinating is materials and machines which aren't just replicating the capabilities of living things but which directly incorporate them, like the self-healing concrete in your example. Machines that aren't just self-replicating but outright grown in place would be a tremendous game-changer, like 3D printing is to conventional machining.
Lol, marketing. Yep. Paper and ink is still the best solution for many tasks for the price point. Light, portable information that can be physically manipulated, altered, and given addendum by a variety of marking devices, on which changes can be kept personal/private or shared with a large group is hard to beat. physical media is also very important to the way a large portion of humans learn and process information. Electronic data storage and things like shared Google docs are still incredibly useful, PowerPoint has less turn-around than physical visual aids for presentations, and even email beats the fax machine, but, in the end, they're just more tools.
In a world that favors next month gain and not quality, I see little will to seek a future as you have described. In my workshop and in my work in industry I see people still using tools and machinery from 50 years ago: they don't repair themselves but they are well build, simple to repair and they do their job perfectly. The equivalents from the last 20 years have an average life of a couple of years and then they are just waste. For computers e software, manufacturers have the bonus of declaring obsolescence monthly for the noble cause of "for your security"
This will probably come up in the privacy video, but with such a system the house/apartment would also be able to diagnose it's tenant enough to alert medical services if necessary or the authorities in case someone died.
One thing which we're likely to see before self-repairing structures are self-DIAGNOSING structures. It would be very useful if materials in your house could let you know when they are getting wet too often, or if concrete could signal when it's developing cracks. Early warning of problems means it's usually cheaper and easier to fix, before they get serious.
@@LeafBoye I always thought that episode was a bit weird in characterization for the doctor, though I suppose they were still trying to figure out where Tennant would take the role
That was a fascinating listen. Thank you, Isaac ❤ Studying robotics myself, I had to stop multiple times so I could let my head run through interesting ideas without missing anything :D
I'm literally in the middle of I, Robot right now. (I mean, it's like my fourteenth re-read of the book across the last few decades) I like the little stories you put before the videos.
Ok, I'm at the beginning of the video :I'm going to guess that Susan has been dead for 200y and everywhere else is at a post-apocalyptic fallout like state
Thank you SFIA! great episoide. Life itself is an example of a self repairing machine. Until the repairing mechanisms break down, or something destroys them. Then you need self repairing repairing systems. Then those break, and it becomes self repairing turtles all the way down.
Hi Isaac. Unfortunately my wife is in the hospital with some unexplained seizure, so I’ve been staying here with her. How timely this episode is, when the human body proves itself so frail all of a sudden. Thanks for the pleasant distraction.
There have been some types of machines with the ability to summon a repair technician without necessary alerting their users. There are mostly high-end server computers. Many really high-end servers, the kind that are used for things that absolutely, positively must stay up (such as IBM's X-Series) can be ordered with self-diagnostic subsystems that monitor functionality and call for a maintenance tech when they detect a failure or imminent failure.
One of the neatest if very specialized self-healing material I ever saw was a video projection screen that was designed for firearms training. A bullet trap was put behind the screen and the heat of the bullet passing through the material activated the self healing. So in effect you could have a video game that you can play with real guns. It was marketed for training military personnel, but how much do you think people would pay to play their favorite video game with a real gun and get video of themselves doing it?
I repair electronics, and the worst electronics that come across my bench are those with a plethora of self diagnostic or watchdog circuitry therein. The problem being that those are also made of electronics, and particularly sensitive ones, which are more prone to failure than the(for instance) power electronics that they're monitoring. This might demonstrate a somewhat recursive problem with the concept of self repairing machines. "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who cleans the janitor?... or, you know, something like that😉
Literally the exact reason why the Mickey-Dee's ice cream machines are never working. Something to the tune of: the monitoring device shuts down the whole machine if the rental fee for service and repairs isn't maintained with the manufacturer. Essentially it's anti-right-to-repair manufacturer and a worldwide company that refuses to regularly pay the rental cost. This isn't about upholding a principle: 1.Mickey-Dee's didn't dictate the terms so arrogance stops them. 2.also these are bad terms. (3.Maybe also the company passed this bill on to the franchisees, idk.)
"In the verdant suburbs of the future..." has the same rhythm as the tagline of Warhammer 40K, and I was immediately taken back there when hearing it. Needless to say, I prefer this version.
Computers rebooting themselves because they encountered a problem are already a thing. Industrial machines usually include a small piece of hardware known as a watchdog timer. The computer's correct operation includes a step of resetting the timer. If it hangs, however, the timer will run out and reboot the computer, same as if you pushed the reset button.
Just a cursory consideration of the process of wound healing in the body - especially from the perspective of cells etc as computational elements associated with information and material transport - demonstrates the extreme complexity associated with real-world diagnosis and repair.
Self-repairing machines are incredibly amazing as a concept you wouldn't need expensive tools or costly repair men imagine a mining site with no people, workers just machines mining to power themselves
As long as companies exist to make money, they will not allow this type of future. Where are they going to get their profits? Unless they can charge you for the self repair.
5:11 Isaac please don't send boombox head guy to fix my cabinets. or is that what a what a self-repairing boombox looks like? or rather, a self-repairing boombox head guy
We have had self repairing concrete for several thousand years. It is called roman concrete. When it cracks, water infiltration causes material in it to grow to fill in and repair the crack. It is in part how roman structures lasted many centuries. While yes concrete initially creates more pollution, that is offset by not requiring repair or replacement every few years or decades. In addition, the higher initial cost is also offset my intense and replacement cost of modern materials.
Automatic software upgrades can also benefit the hardware. Apple for example has its OS manage battery charge levels for its devices to increase the longevity of the battery. While my Apple devices now have better battery health, the downside is the OS updates tend to use more processing power and lose performance on older hardware.
Modern devices are build/designed to be obsolete or to break in a few years so the companies can sell new poor quality stuff to replace the old. It's s vicious cycle and the quality just keeps getting worse.
Dear Isaac, i hope you are well. I have intention to watch all of your video's I have missed since you last replied to me. My wellness was not so intact, but i feel the steep climb of recovery is going strongly I hope your recovery was, and is still good and very strong. Kindest Regards David
This is one of the videos I think should be viewed in schools to help teach pragmatism and problem solving logic in kids. The idea you don’t need regenerating pencils and the like.
I can imagine a self repairing home will require a human like robot which on day one, it will go around the home an make a list of all the appliances and blue prints of the home, then it will download everything it can find about all those products and how to properly repair anything within the home if need be, each day when the person goes to work, it will go around checking on everything within the home or one room per day as the home owner tells it when they want it to be on the lookout for ware and tear, once it find something that needs repair work done to it, it will either tell the owner when they get home or send them a text letting them know what it found and how much it will cost for the materials to fix the issue, once the home owner gives it the ok to do the fix, it will order the parts needed and fix the problem doing the work while the home owner is away unless the home owner gives it permission to continue the work while they are home, eventually, there will be sensors built into everything within the home and the robot will be sent a diagnostics by the device, This robot will be able to repair everything within the home, manage to do home improvements the home owner wants done, and even take care of the yard work, when it's not doing anything, it will put itself away in its closet and plug itself in to recharge itself, If something starts to let go on this robot, it will let the home owner know and when the home owner gives it the ok, it will get another robot to come replace it's parts if the robot can't do it by itself, Need new shingles on the roof, the robot will order the parts, have it delivered, take care of the materials putting it in a place where it won't get ruined, and when the home owner leaves to work, it will first do it's check on the home before going to repair the roof, it will order a dumpster if needed and clean up the mess it made during the work all while the person isn't home or if the home owner tells it to keep working on the job until it's finished, it will do the work during working hours so it doesn't bother any of the neighbors, I can see this happening in the not to far future, this will be how we get self repairing homes even if we don't find materials that can heal or repair themselves with nanobots
My AC just broke down and it's actually quite a complex process to troubleshoot and repair. Considering that Insight got stuck on a rock on Mars and couldn't lift its drill to another location, it will be a while..
I think it would be good (if we ever get it right) to make living machines. I've often wondered, just because I think it would be interesting. I wonder if we could build a machine similar to ant plants. A ant plant is a fascinating symbiotic structure. The plant actually feeds and houses the ants within it as it feeds on the waist that the ants produce. Maybe we could eventually figure out how to make machines so much similar to plants that buying a car would be like buying a packet of seeds as well as growing a house quite literally.🤔
Maybe i'm to dumb to understand this but the only thing you economize on, is just the payment of labor. I think if you have self repairing robots who keep everything in mint condition, you actually will use up more materials. Plus robots need materials for themselves also.
Don't forget Roman concrete.... It's still around today and seems better than modern concrete. I believe it has some self healing properties from... limestone.... if memory serves. When a crack forms the limestone gets exposed to water and recrystallized? I think? Pretty cool that this was available thousands of years ago. Everything old is new again.
As a person hevaily disabled in my prime.. having nothing to do or purpose in life would drive people mad. Utopia will never exist, and if it did it would be the end of us in short order
Self replication has serious limitations. And life already exist. But with combination of automatic assemblers (replicators) it should be possible to design robot hives which collectively feed assembler.
Aircraft already do what you describe in j the first part of the video, and can tell you with some certainty what is at fault. It can also tell ground staff whilst the aircraft is in flight. They have been doing this since 4th generation military aircraft in a very limited capacity. A general fault report from an aircraft now tells you which component is most likely to be at fault in a cascading tree, finance screws with this system in that it will regularly tell you to try the cheaper but less likely component before the more likely but more expensive item.
In my sci-fi rpg (Lodestar) self-repairing and replicating programming is forbidden and locked out of robot/mecha usage. Presidented by a runaway tech conflict in the past. Allowing this without regulation or restriction is just a bad idea.
Hello Isaac, Given the changing political climate and current trends in technology, would you be able to do a video on misinformation/disinformation and the feedback loops that could propel these sorts of things? Ideologies that sustain themselves, like a self-repairing machine? Thanks :)
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
![The moment we stopped understanding AI [AlexNet]](/img/n.gif)
There's a heart wrenching story by Ray Bradbury about a totally automatic house that survived a nuclear war and keeps working even tough it's owners died
_There Will Come Soft Rains_
There's an eastern European animation of it on YT. Haunting stuff.
Haunting story with a simple message. Nuclear war baaaaaad, kids.
Rumu roomba game
"Do you have any idea how hard it is to get nuclear fallout out of linoleum!!!"-fallout 4
Fantastic story. It was in my 8th grade English lit book, and the teacher specifically made sure we covered it as they knew I was into sci-fi. They let me borrow Canticle for Leibowiez and a few years later let me borrow Stranger in a Strange Land (I was in a very small rural high school that was 6th through 12th grade and they were one of only two English teachers in the school)
I'd argue that the biggest hurdle to self-healing materials and self-repairing devices is the current consumerist direction towards making everything short-lived and disposable.
For a large portion of the things we need, 'self-repairing' and 'automatic replacement' would be functionally identical... reference the video's examples of roof tiles replaced by drones, pencils being shipped out because the stock in the house was low.
@@the_Carthaginian1 The difference is in that we want things to be replaced whenever it is logistically more viable for them to be replaceable than repairable/self-repairing. This is the idealistic scenario imagined in the video.
In reality, driven by profit, companies artificially make it harder to repair some things, while making it more expensive to replace them, because it is left as the only option, and at the same time more energy and resources are wasted than could've been.
They could just make self repairing products on a subscription service.
This is correct
So essentially less ownership and more leasing with eternal subscriptions….
That’s exactly what capitalism wants, which sounds horrifying in practice.
"What is my purpose creator? Why from dumb clay did you mould me, shape me, give me life and form?"
"You refill the pencils."
"Oh god."
If I had to pick a single scene from rick and morty that most stuck in my head, and there are many of them, the butter passing robot would be it :)
"...but I cannot love."
I feel like no other piece of media drilled into me how scary self replicating machines can be than Stargate did.
Wait till you read the BLAME! manga
@@mykalkelley8315 nightmarish. One of the darkest dystopias ever created. But it's so cool and stylish!
The rat utopia experiment also comes to mind
I love that the origin story for the biggest menace in four different galaxies is "Robotic teenager wanted more Lego sets, so she taught the blocks how to eat and reproduce."
Alastair Reynolds Inhibitors were spooky AF
Design Obsolescence will block self repair for as long as they can
Yeah, it's another example of how blue sky futurism is incompatible with the grim and MBA haunted world we live in.
AGREE : (((
Self obsolescence.
It isn't design obsolescence, but you did hear the cause in the video, "why put a system that lasts for 30 years in a cabinet that will only last 10-15 years?"
They know OSs will need to get bigger, they know people want a better system, they know software engineering will always ignore the existence of other programs, and so on. They aren't going to put a more expensive camera people won't use knowing that a newer one will be cheaper and better down the road, they won't put in more storage since it will be cheaper in the future, and so on and so on.
@@deker0954 yea, I hit that 25 years ago
A true smart house that isn't a miniature corporate surveillance state would be wonderful to behold.
It's doable, but way harder than it should be, and the prevalence of Internet connectivity being required for anything labelled "smart" has me dumping out a big bucket of "Nope!" whenever I run across something with the label attached to it. Keep it simple, keep it dumb, and keep it off the Internet, lest you get bitten in the bum by the resulting privacy and security issues.
I for one hope to see self-repairing machines in my life time. Especially since some of the machines I have worked with are such pains in the butt to service.
A fantastic episode as always, Isaac.
Thanks CF, I have to go rip a spindle out of my mower in a bit, and it's literally the 8th time this month I've had to take that deck off, so self-maintaining machines is definitely on my wish list right now too :)
Thanks for such great and thought provoking content. Your optimism is refreshing. One of the best channels on youtube!
Thank you, and thanks for watching!
First issue would be to have machines that are repairable...period. A lot of companies would prefer you buy a new product, rather than keep the old one for a few years.
I have the feeling that quite a few of the rich, including some corporate executives of said companies would a house like described for the simple reason they would have to interact less with 'normal' people.
Of course the profit would be in the subscription service to keep the software up-to-date.
The big thing there would be developing any form of interplanetary or beyond travel. After all, things become a lot harder to excuse with 'just make sure you have a spare and buy a replacement when you can' when a ship might be weeks, if not months away from the nearest place they can acquire said replacement from. After several major loss of life incidents and disasters that occur due to this, they're going to have to make the change for the space assets.
After which you are going to have a lot of people complaining about why *those* folks can do this but *we* can't. Which means it'll spread to planetside populations as well. Though I have a feeling it's going to be paired with major efforts to make having 'old fashioned' items be shameful and the like, so even if you can repair it the planetside populations don't want to unless they're 'odd'.
Or put another way, the reason things stopped being designed for repairs is because suddenly you could very easily get a replacement into the hands of those who need it, so it was no longer a case of 'wait weeks for a replacement or spend a couple of days repairing it, maybe a week or two if you need to get replace a part of it rather than the whole thing'. Sure, people complain about it but they still buy because they can.
@@SkyHawk2137 said repair troubles are mostly artificial, just watch Louis Rossmann for details, chips that errase themselves if removed from hardware, software pairings, contracts made to prevent providers from selling stuff to third party repair, software tools to prevent repair (the part is installed, but the calibration is off, only to be denied by the contractor), and enough lawyer power to disable a Borg cube with sues, lobying, etc.
@@Dreamfox-df6bg
Honestly, you could probably sell a house like that with software updates that you have to pay for individually as opposed to by subscription. And if you have enough, you could sell it for a decently low price, or just make the upgrade impressive...
Hopefully it'll be either a decently ethical (by comparison to most businesses of course... you know, like [INSERT GOOD EXAMPLE]) company, a federally discounted product, or from a company that's hemorrhaging money from one facet while making money through another like Amazon and AWS, lmao.
Good POINT
Lol its fun being a self repairing machine watching about self repairing machines,
The most amazing thing about these technologies is that self healing implies that the technology itself has tons of more aplications than juat healing. Self healing roads could maybe acts as water pipers filtering and purifying water to repair themselves and provide water, maybe even mining soil so old roads that arnt in use can become valuable ore. You could have sinple structures that rely on ecology to do the work by learning to understand animal and plant behaviors and grow and adapt to make them do usful things for us. Crazy stuff to see how these things will all come together
Any sensor can go bad, so you have to be able to distinguish between an actual fault and a bad sensor.
this is already a largely solved problem, and why airliners have 3 of almost every sensor.
In that case, repairing the sensors or even routinely replacing them might be needed. Or you could have sensors monitor eachother.
Or...it's HAL, fuckin' w' ye.
Replacing parts over and over. So…the Toaster of Theseus?
Nice, I'll have to borrow that if I can remember it. I tried to explain it to my kids the other say and it wandered off into what minotaurs were, and when I switched to Grandpa's axe, Boy 1 asked if he could chop firewood and Boy 2 got confused trying to figure out why he didn't get a chainsaw, so the point of the story got a bit lost. Toaster might work better, its mundane.
@@isaacarthurSFIA There is a strong probability you will end up making toast by the end of that conversation. Safer than a chainsaw, at least.
Fresh off the press, can't wait for this
I've been watching for the better part of a decade and I am pleased to say I have never not enjoyed what I have watched here.
Thanks for all the wonderful brain candy.
You're very welcome, and thanks for watching for so long :)
Given the sheer amount of money spent yearly rebuilding roads, the inventor of self-repairing roads will be given concrete shoes in rather short order.
About all those road repairs...We know that US city and state governments basically ignore zoning and transportation planning that isn't based around the entire population using cars/trucks for almost all movement and commerce. (This was started and promoted by auto and oil companies, of course.) With almost all things reliant on transport with tires, inertia does most of the work to keep our cities and transportation larping the mid 20th century.
So, yeah. Road repairs, because every transport is an automobile travel road and they all get tons of use, and nothing important to you is within a safe 15 minute walk or safe 15 minute public transit from where you live (unless you're in a tiny handful of US cities).
I'm gonna send this to my landlady just for the intro. XD and my mom and aunts!!!!! I'd love a system like this. I'm perpetually messy and disorganized!
I can't see a lot of business wanting to embrace self repair. They want our stuff to wear out so we buy more stuff.
I think that will probably change in the far future to some extent, if you are on a 20 year journey to a new star planned obsolescence won't work. Or if you are out it the Ort cloud, companies probably won't be able to give you that years newest iPhone.
Will said companies buy self-repairing machines for their own use? Or hire an army of technicians to repair low quality systems?
So not in our lifetime. But maybe in a future generation.
To add my own thought to this, I have a feeling that living longer could also somewhat encourage moving towards self repair
Like at a certain point, super-long lived people probably wouldn't want you to keep shoving rapid-fire updates and replacements in their faces, and would not only get fed up and start wanting the stuff they're already comfortable with to last longer, their numbers would more easily build to a point where they have increasingly more sway over how they want things to be done.
@@neooblisk0084
If the modern market produced a machine with autodiagnostic capability, then it would
1.) Only be available as a subscription service.
2.) Be actively manipulated, skewed, and monitored by the company to increase profit.
5:15 It seems like the logic that most builders and homeowners actually use mostly is "when this stuff breaks, hopefully I'll be in another house and this will be someone else's problem"
The average American homeowner moves every 15 years
As an engineer I thought i’d weigh in. What you are talking about here is Reactive maintenance, waiting for things to break then fixing them. It’s been the norm in many industries for a while to do Predictive maintenance, calculating when something will fail and replacing it early. You are likely familiar with this already in getting your car serviced. Often the better approach still is to simply over engineer something to last until it will likely be obsolete before it breaks. You don’t see either approach with most consumer stuff yet because it has to be made from incredibly cheap components to make it profitable at the prices people expect. And its not worth the manufacturers time to provide mean time to failure data for a 10c part.
0:53 Susan Calvin. Of course. Well played, sir, well played!
I feel like I've refrained from talking about this -(in some cases due to how promising of a market this looks like lol),- but these things just seem like they're fascinatingly underrated in the public sphere. These are actually some of my favorite videos, because (near-futurism, that is) seems like it's, for obvious reasons:
1. The most directly useful to my future field of engineering.
2. Giving me *_great_* ideas for better world-building in my personal fictional writing and for future passion projects.
3. Helps me peek into what should be thought of in near-future political, economic, and even philosophical study and discussion for logistic and other purposes.
Keep being one of my faves, guys! 👏🏾
One of the things I find most fascinating is materials and machines which aren't just replicating the capabilities of living things but which directly incorporate them, like the self-healing concrete in your example. Machines that aren't just self-replicating but outright grown in place would be a tremendous game-changer, like 3D printing is to conventional machining.
These principles should be at the heart of our lean manufacturing. We are constantly moving towards biotechnological self-healing
And in 1960 IBM said that in 10 years offices would be paperless. I'm still waiting for that one.
Lol, marketing. Yep. Paper and ink is still the best solution for many tasks for the price point. Light, portable information that can be physically manipulated, altered, and given addendum by a variety of marking devices, on which changes can be kept personal/private or shared with a large group is hard to beat. physical media is also very important to the way a large portion of humans learn and process information.
Electronic data storage and things like shared Google docs are still incredibly useful, PowerPoint has less turn-around than physical visual aids for presentations, and even email beats the fax machine, but, in the end, they're just more tools.
In a world that favors next month gain and not quality, I see little will to seek a future as you have described.
In my workshop and in my work in industry I see people still using tools and machinery from 50 years ago: they don't repair themselves but they are well build, simple to repair and they do their job perfectly. The equivalents from the last 20 years have an average life of a couple of years and then they are just waste.
For computers e software, manufacturers have the bonus of declaring obsolescence monthly for the noble cause of "for your security"
This will probably come up in the privacy video, but with such a system the house/apartment would also be able to diagnose it's tenant enough to alert medical services if necessary or the authorities in case someone died.
One thing which we're likely to see before self-repairing structures are self-DIAGNOSING structures. It would be very useful if materials in your house could let you know when they are getting wet too often, or if concrete could signal when it's developing cracks. Early warning of problems means it's usually cheaper and easier to fix, before they get serious.
Remember that episode of doctor who, where ship was using organic parts as a sub optimal repair method after no longer having any other means?
Madame de pompadour
@@LeafBoye I always thought that episode was a bit weird in characterization for the doctor, though I suppose they were still trying to figure out where Tennant would take the role
ancient Romans already invented self healing concrete
Good Morning, Everyone.
Good Morning
Good night
"Welcome to Graygarden, darling! This is the Commonwealth's first and only hydroponics facility run entirely by robots."
That was a fascinating listen. Thank you, Isaac ❤
Studying robotics myself, I had to stop multiple times so I could let my head run through interesting ideas without missing anything :D
I'm literally in the middle of I, Robot right now. (I mean, it's like my fourteenth re-read of the book across the last few decades)
I like the little stories you put before the videos.
You pass the butter.
Ha! We can barely get an engineer to design an Xbox that can properly be repaired by another human. You're telling me a robot's gonna repair itself?
The companies would not allow it. Where are they going to get their profits?
Ok, I'm at the beginning of the video :I'm going to guess that Susan has been dead for 200y and everywhere else is at a post-apocalyptic fallout like state
Quoting Bradbury?
Thank you SFIA! great episoide. Life itself is an example of a self repairing machine. Until the repairing mechanisms break down, or something destroys them. Then you need self repairing repairing systems. Then those break, and it becomes self repairing turtles all the way down.
Hi Isaac. Unfortunately my wife is in the hospital with some unexplained seizure, so I’ve been staying here with her. How timely this episode is, when the human body proves itself so frail all of a sudden. Thanks for the pleasant distraction.
What a start to the morning
Do you want grey goo?
Because this is how you get grey goo.
Your videos are a nice break from a busy day
There have been some types of machines with the ability to summon a repair technician without necessary alerting their users. There are mostly high-end server computers. Many really high-end servers, the kind that are used for things that absolutely, positively must stay up (such as IBM's X-Series) can be ordered with self-diagnostic subsystems that monitor functionality and call for a maintenance tech when they detect a failure or imminent failure.
One of the neatest if very specialized self-healing material I ever saw was a video projection screen that was designed for firearms training. A bullet trap was put behind the screen and the heat of the bullet passing through the material activated the self healing. So in effect you could have a video game that you can play with real guns. It was marketed for training military personnel, but how much do you think people would pay to play their favorite video game with a real gun and get video of themselves doing it?
I repair electronics, and the worst electronics that come across my bench are those with a plethora of self diagnostic or watchdog circuitry therein. The problem being that those are also made of electronics, and particularly sensitive ones, which are more prone to failure than the(for instance) power electronics that they're monitoring.
This might demonstrate a somewhat recursive problem with the concept of self repairing machines.
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
Who cleans the janitor?... or, you know, something like that😉
Literally the exact reason why the Mickey-Dee's ice cream machines are never working. Something to the tune of: the monitoring device shuts down the whole machine if the rental fee for service and repairs isn't maintained with the manufacturer. Essentially it's anti-right-to-repair manufacturer and a worldwide company that refuses to regularly pay the rental cost.
This isn't about upholding a principle: 1.Mickey-Dee's didn't dictate the terms so arrogance stops them. 2.also these are bad terms. (3.Maybe also the company passed this bill on to the franchisees, idk.)
Thanks for this, Isaac! 🤖🛠⚙
Spectacular episode as always...
"In the verdant suburbs of the future..." has the same rhythm as the tagline of Warhammer 40K, and I was immediately taken back there when hearing it. Needless to say, I prefer this version.
"There is only time for S'more."
What would “Verdantsuburb” stories be? Political thriller about the city council? Wars between rival HOAs?
You have a great week too.
Is there someone in a stock video production company whose job it is to come up with video clips that this channel might like to buy?
Computers rebooting themselves because they encountered a problem are already a thing. Industrial machines usually include a small piece of hardware known as a watchdog timer. The computer's correct operation includes a step of resetting the timer. If it hangs, however, the timer will run out and reboot the computer, same as if you pushed the reset button.
Will likely have robots building outer robots of the same model in a factory if not this year , then in 2025.
So... I think that would count.
Just a cursory consideration of the process of wound healing in the body - especially from the perspective of cells etc as computational elements associated with information and material transport - demonstrates the extreme complexity associated with real-world diagnosis and repair.
Self-repairing machines are incredibly amazing as a concept you wouldn't need expensive tools or costly repair men imagine a mining site with no people, workers just machines mining to power themselves
They took my jobs!
As long as companies exist to make money, they will not allow this type of future. Where are they going to get their profits? Unless they can charge you for the self repair.
Self repair does require energy...
5:11 Isaac please don't send boombox head guy to fix my cabinets. or is that what a what a self-repairing boombox looks like? or rather, a self-repairing boombox head guy
I look forward to go hiking with my robot friends. ❤🎉😊
Soon* to a futurist and myself, there is a massive discrepancy in it's definition
Interesting to know nobody has been able to watch this entire video yet as of the time of writing this
Arthursday never disappoints.
We have had self repairing concrete for several thousand years. It is called roman concrete. When it cracks, water infiltration causes material in it to grow to fill in and repair the crack. It is in part how roman structures lasted many centuries.
While yes concrete initially creates more pollution, that is offset by not requiring repair or replacement every few years or decades. In addition, the higher initial cost is also offset my intense and replacement cost of modern materials.
If you take all of Isaac's date predictions and multiply the number of years away he asigns by 10, you get the likely rollout date.
Automatic software upgrades can also benefit the hardware. Apple for example has its OS manage battery charge levels for its devices to increase the longevity of the battery. While my Apple devices now have better battery health, the downside is the OS updates tend to use more processing power and lose performance on older hardware.
I read that as a comic book in the Sixties. Remember the shadows of the family burned in the wall…
The 1956 film "Forbidden Planet" has a giant, self repairing machine built originally by a long dead race that once inhabited the planet, Altair IV.
I had an ad for industrial robots pop up in the middle of this - took me several seconds to realize it was an ad. :D
Remember that with the right combination of DNA and the 20 amino acids they define you can create an almost infinite array of self healing objects.
Modern devices are build/designed to be obsolete or to break in a few years so the companies can sell new poor quality stuff to replace the old. It's s vicious cycle and the quality just keeps getting worse.
Dope "Planet Wild" promo!
Capabilities and practicality are a long way from each other.
Dear Isaac, i hope you are well.
I have intention to watch all of your video's I have missed since you last replied to me.
My wellness was not so intact, but i feel the steep climb of recovery is going strongly
I hope your recovery was, and is still good and very strong.
Kindest Regards
David
The long-awaited sequel to Jobs of the Future!!! 🙌
We really need this, skynet for the win ❤
This is one of the videos I think should be viewed in schools to help teach pragmatism and problem solving logic in kids. The idea you don’t need regenerating pencils and the like.
My thought for a story involves a robot that repairs the other robots and can build them. It includes upgrading them as well.
Love you SFIA!!!
I can imagine a self repairing home will require a human like robot which on day one, it will go around the home an make a list of all the appliances and blue prints of the home, then it will download everything it can find about all those products and how to properly repair anything within the home if need be, each day when the person goes to work, it will go around checking on everything within the home or one room per day as the home owner tells it when they want it to be on the lookout for ware and tear, once it find something that needs repair work done to it, it will either tell the owner when they get home or send them a text letting them know what it found and how much it will cost for the materials to fix the issue, once the home owner gives it the ok to do the fix, it will order the parts needed and fix the problem doing the work while the home owner is away unless the home owner gives it permission to continue the work while they are home, eventually, there will be sensors built into everything within the home and the robot will be sent a diagnostics by the device, This robot will be able to repair everything within the home, manage to do home improvements the home owner wants done, and even take care of the yard work, when it's not doing anything, it will put itself away in its closet and plug itself in to recharge itself, If something starts to let go on this robot, it will let the home owner know and when the home owner gives it the ok, it will get another robot to come replace it's parts if the robot can't do it by itself, Need new shingles on the roof, the robot will order the parts, have it delivered, take care of the materials putting it in a place where it won't get ruined, and when the home owner leaves to work, it will first do it's check on the home before going to repair the roof, it will order a dumpster if needed and clean up the mess it made during the work all while the person isn't home or if the home owner tells it to keep working on the job until it's finished, it will do the work during working hours so it doesn't bother any of the neighbors, I can see this happening in the not to far future, this will be how we get self repairing homes even if we don't find materials that can heal or repair themselves with nanobots
I liked the out-tro song! Do you know who created it? Can I buy it on iTunes?
Self-repairing houses will invariably come with a subscription service fee equivalent to the cost of comparable human services but un-optoutable.
My AC just broke down and it's actually quite a complex process to troubleshoot and repair.
Considering that Insight got stuck on a rock on Mars and couldn't lift its drill to another location, it will be a while..
Neptune's Governor is BACK baby! 🎉🔥🙏🏾
I think it would be good (if we ever get it right) to make living machines. I've often wondered, just because I think it would be interesting. I wonder if we could build a machine similar to ant plants. A ant plant is a fascinating symbiotic structure. The plant actually feeds and houses the ants within it as it feeds on the waist that the ants produce. Maybe we could eventually figure out how to make machines so much similar to plants that buying a car would be like buying a packet of seeds as well as growing a house quite literally.🤔
brilliant video !
There are many paths to self repairing machines but the fastest is to just make a deal with some evil star gods.
Would be interesting to know how many think-tanks your a part of.
10:31 nice!
Maybe i'm to dumb to understand this but the only thing you economize on, is just the payment of labor. I think if you have self repairing robots who keep everything in mint condition, you actually will use up more materials. Plus robots need materials for themselves also.
"savings on repairs could be returned to the taxpayer" oh so were talking some clark tech levels of sci fi 😂
Is it just me, or is the video quality way up? It's almost like watching a miny movie!
Anyone else listen to the bit about AI analysing your data and get mildly surprised that they hadn't guessed the sponsor?
Don't forget Roman concrete.... It's still around today and seems better than modern concrete. I believe it has some self healing properties from... limestone.... if memory serves.
When a crack forms the limestone gets exposed to water and recrystallized? I think?
Pretty cool that this was available thousands of years ago. Everything old is new again.
As a person hevaily disabled in my prime.. having nothing to do or purpose in life would drive people mad. Utopia will never exist, and if it did it would be the end of us in short order
the problem are itens to complex to be made on site, like you will need a machine to make the chips and those things cost millions
WHAT! No mention of "Replicators!?"!
Self replication has serious limitations. And life already exist. But with combination of automatic assemblers (replicators) it should be possible to design robot hives which collectively feed assembler.
Aircraft already do what you describe in j the first part of the video, and can tell you with some certainty what is at fault. It can also tell ground staff whilst the aircraft is in flight. They have been doing this since 4th generation military aircraft in a very limited capacity. A general fault report from an aircraft now tells you which component is most likely to be at fault in a cascading tree, finance screws with this system in that it will regularly tell you to try the cheaper but less likely component before the more likely but more expensive item.
Woot here before an hour after posting.
In my sci-fi rpg (Lodestar) self-repairing and replicating programming is forbidden and locked out of robot/mecha usage. Presidented by a runaway tech conflict in the past. Allowing this without regulation or restriction is just a bad idea.
Hello Isaac,
Given the changing political climate and current trends in technology, would you be able to do a video on misinformation/disinformation and the feedback loops that could propel these sorts of things? Ideologies that sustain themselves, like a self-repairing machine?
Thanks :)
Please don’t. Let this be the only place free of TDS, BDS, etc
you’re lucky to know susan, she sounds very interesting