bascule Posted September 5, 2009 Posted September 5, 2009 I take it you mean either Grey goo or unlimited self-replicating nanobiology that consumes all matter in the world? Perhaps you should go back and reread my link... Utility fog is not the same as grey goo. The idea behind grey goo is that it's an undirected self-replicator that knows to do nothing but self-replicate. Utility fog implies some degree of high-level organization, and I implied they were being organized by an artificially intelligent entity. Also, the nanos require energy -- no different than our biological needs, really. It's what everything operates on, so they've no advantage over us. We need to eat food. Utility fog could be powered by anything. How do they know not to eat one another? [...] Now if do they communicate, it's possible to avoid that, but now another problem crops up -- how would one distant part of a swarm know which sections of Earth the others have already consumed?[/url] Any high level actions (not necessarily eating the earth) could be known by all participants because they could run a distributed intelligence program. It'd be no different from you knowing the general state of all parts of your body. They're unlikely to survive intense conditions like magma and extreme weather. What if they're designed (by a recursively self-improving artificial intelligence) to withstand intense conditions?
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