the onda

Continuing on the hardware theme for the week, I was recently captivated by Adrian Bowyer's presentation at POPTech last year on self-replicating 3-D printers. Still very early on, these 3-D printers are essentially glorified glue guns mounted on harnesses that can use them to squirt out three-dimensional objects one layer at a time. The really neat hack to his work however is that the printers can "print" most of their own parts thus placing the devices themselves on an exponential, evolution-like curve where the random mutation role is played by people tinkering with the printers to make them better while the evolutionary cycles are fueled by these same people posting the improvements back to the Internet.

Imagine what technologies like these would do to another project I found this weekend at the Harvard microbotics lab, a robotic fly which can be manufactured cheaply and is almost exactly the size of a real fly (see the video).

How annoying is it going to be when robotic flies are capable of self-replicating and evolving on their own?