There are proposals for the 6G standard to support Integrated Sensing and Communication(ISAC)[0]. So the hardware might natively be able to support gait recognition. The use cases given are UAV detection and localization. It sort of seems like this could bring Vernor Vinge's localizer mesh to reality, privacy implications be damned
[0]https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2024/6/integrated-sensing-a...
Industrial robots at least are very reliable, MTBF is often upwards of 100,000 hours[0]. Industrial robots are optimized to be as reliable as possible because the longer they last and less often they need to be fixed, the more profitable they are. In fact, German and Japanese companies came to dominate the industrial robotics market because they focused on reliability. They developed rotary electric actuators that were more reliable. Cincinnati Millicron(US) was out competed in the industrial robot market because although their hydraulic robots were strong, they were less reliable.
I am personally a bit skeptical of anthropormophic hands achieving similarly high reliability. There's just too many small parts that need to withstand high forces.
If you E-stop an industrial robot, it stops immediately, all OK. If a humanoid were to freeze like that, it would fall over and hurt you and your stuff on the way down, when it'll damage itself.
Mechanical reliability is not the main concern IMO
This will probably need to be updated soon. There are rumors NIF recently achieved a gain of ~4.4 and ~10% fuel burn up. Being able to ignite more fuel is notable in and of itself.
In the context implied above it is the ratio of fusion energy released to laser energy on target or the laser energy crossing the vacuum vessel boundary (they are the same in this case). So it would have been more precise to say "target gain" or "scientific gain".
And why wouldn't it work? Linear slide like mechanisms consisting of a silver surface and single molecule have been demonstrated[0]. The molecule only moved along rows of the silver surface. It was demonstrated to stay in one of these grooves up to 150 nm. A huge distance at this scale.
It can work (see my sibling comment) but it's tricky. The experiment you link was done under ultra-high vacuum and at low temperatures (below 7 K), using a quite exotic molecule which is, as I understand it, covered in halogens to combat the "sticky fingers" problem.
You seem to be knowledgeable about this topic. The reversible
component designs in the article appear to presuppose a clock signal
without much else said about it. I get that someone might be able to
prototype an individual gate, but is the implementation of a practical
clock distribution network at molecular scales reasonable to take for granted?
To your question: I suppose all you need is for the halide moieties (Br) in your gates to also couple to the halide ions (Br clock?). The experiment you link was conducted at 7K for the benefit of being able to observe it with STM?
That's a different kind of clock, and its clock mechanism is a gradual and somewhat random decrease in the concentration of one reagent until it crosses a threshold which changes the equilibrium constant of iodine. It isn't really related to the kind of clock you use for digital logic design, which is a periodic oscillation whose purpose is generally to make your design insensitive to glitches. Usually you care about glitches because they could cause incorrect state transitions, but in this case the primary concern is that they would cause irreversible power dissipation.
The experiment was conducted at 7K so the molecule would stick to the metal instead of shaking around randomly like a punk in a mosh pit and then flying off into space.
Yeah you're probably right about the clocks but I hope that wouldn't stop people from trying :)
>The experiment was conducted at 7K so the molecule
Br is good at sticking to Ag so I suspect the 7K is mainly (besides issues connected to their AFM^W STM setup) because the Euro dudes love ORNL's cryo engineering :)
Br's orbitals are filled here because it's covalently bonded to a carbon, so it's basically krypton. Experiments with moving atoms around on surfaces with STMs are always done at cryogenic temperatures because that's the only way to do them.
>. Hence, the Br atoms kept the molecules on track, likely because their
interaction with the surface substantially contributed to the barrier for molecular rotation
Yeah that's a reason people prefer AFM (but then they won't be able to do manipulation)?
[Br- is a "good leaving group", not so much at 7K maybe. You are also right in that, above all, they don't want their molecule sticking (irreversibly) to the (tungsten) tip ]
I'm only acquainted with the basics of the topic, not really knowledgeable. It's an interesting question. I don't think the scale poses any problem—the smaller the scale is, the easier it is to distribute the clock—but there might be some interesting problems related to distributing the clock losslessly.
Those are some of the halogens I'm talking about. It's a little more polarizable than the covalently-bonded fluorine, so you get more of a van der Waals attraction, but still only a very weak one.
At some point, making mechanical watches more complicated will require going digital. It is possible to make very small gears with semiconductor processes, however, very small gears wear out fast due to stiction.
In order for gears to work they must have sliding contact and that means wear. Mechanisms based on flexures don't have this problem, but this requires building the clock very differently. It might be possible to implement many of these complications using flexure based logic[0].
I would not consider this a 'robot' because power and control is not on board. It's more of a puppet than a robot. At the very least, the magnets should be included in the size of the robot.
What's interesting is the vision language capability they have. Being able to verbally describe tasks and determine if a task was completed means they might be able to do self-play for a massive number of different tasks to improve motor skills.
Solar panels enabling offgrid power is tagcloud-related to surviving human civilization collapse.
We're entering an era of decreased globalism, where megacorporation scale actually becomes a danger to society due to reduced warehousing/stockpiling and long extended supply lines, and of course offshored manufacturing that goes with that.
Before solar panels become impossible to purchase, they will be difficult to purchase.
Before solar panels become difficult to purchase, they will become more expensive to purchase.
Mass produced solar panels have been getting both cheaper and easier to get. What you describe could happen, but it's far enough off that we have not seen even the first warning signs yet.
Okay, sure, but that's no different than the same identical "warning signs" that people have been flipping out about since the 1960s.
Maybe some individual country will have some collapse, but all of human civilization will not.
I.maintain that if you're worried about any of that, you are still better off stockpiling panels now, than developing ways to make your own much worse ones in your backyard.
DIY photovoltaics can be a fun hobby but for someone worried about an actual collapse they can acquire a lifetime supply of solar panels and batteries for less money and time than setting up a custom fab that's able to operate in a collapse situation.
Is your argument because we have not had a nuclear war yet, we will never have one?
Can you elaborate? I would like to have your confidence ..
And in general setting up a solar panel fab is maybe not the best prepper action, but for the point of distributing critical techologies for a potential reconstruction, I do see the point.
There is individual survival and general progress of the species.
There's exactly one scenario that results in the actual technological collapse of our species, which is all out nuclear war between the US and Russia. Which with the current presidential administration, is possibly less likely than it's ever been; why would Russia nuke its newest ally?
The chances of a nuclear weapon being used somewhere right now tactically I think are quite high. Russia in Ukraine, or Israel in Iran (or someday soon Iran in Israel), or between India and Pakistan. But none of those are sufficient to bring us to a point where home manufacturing of solar panels becomes remotely worthwhile.
I believe it's optimistic to think that that is the only scenario. Consider the problems we had during the pandemic, which was luckily just a minor blip as far as possible global disruptions go.
The problem is, except for the very first ones in Japan, there were never any nuclear weapons being used in a major war exactly for the unknown consequences of the other players.
It is all interconnected. If one nuke is used, then there will be many on the other side applying pressure to also use a nuke. And so on. I assume much more countries secretly have nukes and the frontlines are somewhat blurry. Meaning, at the moment I am also not too worried, but if a nuke is used it will be a very high gamble, that it will be just the only one.
Most countries definitely do not have nukes. There are a handful that could have them in secret, or that maintain the materials to make them immediately if needed. But all of those combined would amount to no more than a few dozen, small, nuclear weapons. There are not a thousand Tsar Bomba size nukes secreted away.
If the US and Russia stood down and the rest of the world let loose all of their nukes, it would be insufficient to cause sufficient damage to the technological integrity of our species such that backyard solar manufacture becomes viable.
I claim it will be hard to limit the use of nuclear weapons.
Just like in the weapons itself, one ignition can trigger a chain reaction in the end forcing russia or US to take part in it as well. If all the people involved are level headed and able to think rational - it likely will prevented also in the future. But if the person in charge is already stressed (and old) and gets lots of pressure - this person, might then feel forced to press a button.
You said "I assume much more countries secretly have nukes".
I claim that beyond the open secret that is Israel, the number of countries controlling a right-now detonatable nuclear weapon who are not on the Wikipedia list of "countries with nukes" is less than 5.
Claiming much more countries secretly have one, is not at all the same as claiming most countries secretly have them. And I agree that it won't be many many, but in this context one previously unknown bomb already might change lots of geopolitical equations and their outcome.
hacker spirit and/or hedge against the end of the industrial age
Personally, I don't have much faith in sustaining a modern industrial lifestyle for billions of people very long term on PV panels or any renewables really (EROEI issues, rare earth minerals etc.). But I'm bullish on electricity in general.
By far the most common PV systems are single-junction monocrystalline silicon. These have had pretty decent ERoEI for many years (9–10 according to https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/67901.pdf, but the energy required for PV modules has dropped precipitously since then) and don't use any rare-earth minerals.
Wind turbines have typically had even higher ERoEI (15–20 according to https://davidturver.substack.com/p/eroei-eroi-of-onshore-off...), and, while they do most commonly use rare earths, that's an engineering tradeoff rather than necessary; currently viable alternatives include switched-reluctance-machine generators (which just use conventional electrical steel, like transformers and relays) and other kinds of rare-earth-free generators: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142071...
