3D Printing

This thesis, while providing a scholarly review of historical and contemporary developments alike, communicates to the lay reader the historical, current, and future impacts of 3D printing on society in the United States

How to build a biological machine using engineering materials and methods

We present work in 3D printing electric motors from basic materials as the key to building a self-replicating machine to colonise the Moon. First, we explore the nature of the biological realm to ascertain its essence, particularly in relation to the origin of life when the inanimate became animate. We take an expansive view of this to ascertain parallels between the biological and the manufactured worlds. Life must have emerged from the available raw material on Earth and, similarly, a self-replicating machine must exploit and leverage the available resources on the Moon. We then examine these lessons to explore the construction of a self-replicating machine using a universal constructor. It is through the universal constructor that the actuator emerges as critical. We propose that 3D printing constitutes an analogue of the biological ribosome and that 3D printing may constitute a universal construction mechanism. Following a description of our progress in 3D printing motors, we suggest that this engineering effort can inform biology, that motors are a key facet of living organisms and illustrate the importance of motors in biology viewed from the perspective of engineering (in the Feynman spirit of "what I cannot create, I cannot understand")

The 1991 Goddard Conference on Space Applications of Artificial Intelligence

The purpose of this annual conference is to provide a forum in which current research and development directed at space applications of artificial intelligence can be presented and discussed. The papers in this proceeding fall into the following areas: Planning and scheduling, fault monitoring/diagnosis/recovery, machine vision, robotics, system development, information management, knowledge acquisition and representation, distributed systems, tools, neural networks, and miscellaneous applications

The Machine–Organism Distinction

The idea that analysis of organisms can proceed by distinguishing organisms from machines is common to many areas of philosophy. This thesis argues that our search for a philosophy of organisms should not proceed by defining or relying on a Machine–Organism Distinction (MOD). We are often able to take biological theories that are thought to characterize organ- isms, such as theories of organismal autonomy and stability, and apply them to machines. I argue that we should not provide an analysis of organisms according to an MOD because there is no distinction available that holds up to scrutiny and evidence. There have been several major attempts to provide an MOD. I divide these in consecutive chapters according to the property of organisms offered as an MOD: teleology (Nicholson 2013), autonomy (Mossio and Moreno 2015), stochasticity (Skillings 2015; Godfrey-Smith 2016) and pro- cessual stability (Dupré and Nicholson 2018). I address these major attempts to provide an MOD by showing how each fails to provide an analysis of organisms that distinguishes them from machines. To do this, I examine a diversity of machines and organisms that serve as naturalistic counterexamples. Discoveries in molecular biology and ecology, as well as developments in robotics and biotechnology, show the failure of MODs in contemporary philosophy and biology. Moreover, not only does the MOD consistently fail, but philosophical arguments that rely upon MODs consistently misrepresent organisms themselves. I conclude with the idea that we should consider machines not as external to, or distinguished from, organisms, but as proper objects of biological science.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Cambridge Commonwealth and European Trust

Liquid notations:A common language of transitions

If we lived in a liquid world, the concept of a "machine" would make no sense. Liquid life is metaphor and apparatus that discusses the consequences of thinking, working, and living through liquids. It is an irreducible, paradoxical, parallel, planetary-scale material condition, unevenly distributed spatially, but temporally continuous. It is what remains when logical explanations can no longer account for the experiences that we recognize as part of "being alive."Liquid Life references a third-millennial understanding of matter that seeks to restore the agency of the liquid soul for an ecological era, which has been banished by reductionist, "brute" materialist discourses and mechanical models of life. Offering an alternative worldview of the living realm through a "new materialist" and "liquid" study of matter, Armstrong conjures forth examples of creatures that do not obey mechanistic concepts like predictability, efficiency, and rationality. With the advent of molecular science, an increasingly persuasive ontology of liquid technologies can be identified. Through the lens of lifelike dynamic droplets, the agency for these systems exists at the interfaces between different fields of matter/energy that respond to highly local effects, with no need for a central organizing system.Liquid Life seeks an alternative partnership between humanity and the natural world. It provokes a re-invention of the languages of the living realm to open up alternative spaces for exploration, including contributor Rolf Hughes’ "angelology" of language, which explores the transformative invocations of prose poetry, and Simone Ferracina’s graphical notations that help shape our concepts of metabolism, upcycling, and designing with fluids. A conceptual and practical toolset for thinking and designing, liquid life reunites us with the irreducible "soul substance" of living things, which will neither be simply "solved," nor go away