Comment by grogs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grogs | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting ideas. I'd love to read some good sciene fiction novels based on this.

It has the potential to be very relevant. 3D plastic printers are interesting, but too limited at the moment. 3D concrete printing has existed for a while though, that can definitely allow software to be/create the walls of your house.

For medicine it's just a case of getting the simulation down. It'll also be interesting if robots get better. There's a lot of boring lab work in the natural sciences, if this can be automated and controlled by software... Your testing can be done by software... Genetic algorithms could be used to find cures to things. (Although using robots to physically test would presumably be much much slower and more expensive than a computer simulation. :( )

I recommend reading The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. It is classic cyber-punk about what happens socio-economically when damn near everything can be made by the 3D printer in the corner of your house, as long as you have the raw materials...and the software.

I think by "your walls are software" he meant that your walls are controlled by software. Think heat management, view screens, maybe re-arranging them with a remote. But they're probably constructed with software, too.

I think he meant more than simply "your walls are controlled by software". Think of Utility Fog: your walls could be made of hundreds of little robots linked together, and can be reconfigured to a different shape in seconds under the control of software. The robots are sort of like three-dimensional pixels; the shape they assume at any given moment is just the shape that the currently running software gives them.

Or perhaps dozens of little robots built the wall in the first place (by lashing together sticks and filling the space between with gravel, say) under software control, and can disassemble it and reassemble it in a different form under software control in an hour or two. In this case the sticks and stones are the pixels.

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