What does Elon mean when he says Optimus Will be the Von Neumann Probe?
Elon is suggesting that Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot could become the key physical universal constructor at the heart of a real von Neumann probe.
Optimus is designed to be a general-purpose humanoid robot that can do any physical task a human can do.
Optimus with very advanced AI Grok 6 or Grok XV.
Enable mining, factory construction and manufacturing capabilities
Energy production
Resource extraction and refining
Machine can create mining and new factories on the Earth, the moon, Mars, Asteroids gather raw materials, build factories, and manufacture more Optimuses.
Once you can produce more Optimuses and Starships on another planet using only local resources, you have achieved self-replication in practice.
Those new Optimuses + Starships can then be sent to yet more star systems, repeating the process.
Optimus is effectively a von Neumann probe with legs.
If you can solve humanoid robots, you can send Optimus to Mars, have it build a base, mine resources, refine them, and produce more Optimuses and more Starships entirely with local materials. That’s the universal replicator.
The limiting factor for us becoming a multi-planetary — and eventually multi-stellar — species is solving humanoid-form robotics.
Saying Optimus will be the von Neumann probe is Elon’s way of claiming that once Tesla cracks mass-producible, super-capable humanoid robots, humanity will have the tool necessary to exponentially spread across the galaxy at a tiny fraction of current projected costs and timescales—turning a 20th-century theoretical concept into an actual engineering roadmap. Whether that happens in 10 years or 100 years is debatable, but that is the grand vision behind the statement.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I think it’d be more accurate to say that humanoid robots in general are the universal replicator. Tesla’s not the only player here.
We are here discussing Von Neuman probes, and in the meantime Tesla is facing a class-action lawsuit after thousands of Powerwall 2 home batteries were remotely drained to 0% and disabled due to a fire-risk recall.
Colonization of the galaxy… while they have to shut down for safety issues, stuff that has zero moving parts.
Not possible to build factories for the advanced microchip production out in space. The rest is doable.
The probes would have to carry a huge supply of electronics with them.
There’s no particular reason you can’t manufacture microchips in space. It’s not economically viable at the moment, of course, but none of the necessary processes actually require gravity.
While at present chip factories are huge, delicate, and enormously expensive, this is to achieve efficient mass production. There are much smaller scale techniques available if you don’t need that sort of thruput.
Von Neumann probes are indeed a key technology, perhaps the key technology, to opening up the Solar System, and later the Galaxy to human civilization. Thing is, Musk has over-promised and under-delivered, and actually deceived (e.g. teleoperating robots supposedly demoing embodied A.I.) so much, and the challenge of Von Neumann probes is so massive, the probe has to be able to fabricate a copy of itself, from the raw minerals it encounters, with no instructions external to it, that I am massively dubious about his ability to even get close. Let me propose a “baby steps” proof of concept. Take some subset of the simpler parts of Optimus, I’m talking about screws, nuts and bolts, gears, you know that sort of thing. Let Optimus loose in an extensively equipped and well stocked machine shop and see whether it can fabricate that subset of the parts used in its body and if it can how long does the process take. Until you can get at least that far with it any talk about Von Neumann probes is smoke and mirrors.
Any talk of von Neumann machines self-replicating and exploring the universe should start of with plans to find, mine, and refine raw material to build those self-replicating space probes.
This is why the “gray goo” scenario never made sense to me. Unless those nanomachines have the ability to transmute elements into something it can use, they would be limited by the least available vital building material.
“Unless those nanomachines have the ability to transmute elements into something it can use, they would be limited by the least available vital building material.”
Sure, that much is obvious.
The nano-machines in Engines of Creation are assumed to be primarily carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. “CHON”, in other words. Just arranged very differently from living organisms, with a lot less water.
On Earth that’s quite common. In a lot of places in the solar system, some of those elements are quite rare.
So the grey goo scenario is originally a nightmare scenario for Earth, of nanomachines disassembling the biosphere for building materials.
Here we’re not talking about nano-machines, though, but instead the original concept, what are today called “clunking replicators”: Fairly conventional industry, only 100% automated. Leans more on silicon and the metallic elements, which are paradoxically both less common in the universe, and more accessible on solid bodies.
But any practical self replicating system for interstellar use would probably need to have a library of alternate designs for components to use, depending on local elemental abundance. A lot of structural parts can be freely substituted between plastics, ceramics, or metals, after all. You can use aluminum instead of copper for wiring. Piezoelectric positioners instead of rare earth magnet based electric motors and gear trains. There’s usually more than one way to skin a cat.
Where particular elements are hard to substitute, they’d usually be a small enough fraction of the machinery to qualify as “trace elements”.
But, yeah, given a gas giant with basically nothing but hydrogen and helium, and all the heavier elements tied up in the core? You’re screwed, no self-replicators, be they automated factories, nanotech, or life.
I agree. Optimus would enable the seed of a replicating industrial economy to be much smaller, and simpler, particularly since the bipedal form may be the best conceivable for assembly, installation, maintenance, and repair of machinery. Some tasks would require more than one Optimus, rather than a more complex robot.
If the first seed failed, the second at the same place would have a better chance because of the resources found, or remaining the first. The optimum investment in a seed would not be the amount to guarantee success every time, since what was sent the first time would not go to waste.
Imagine how much easier the setup of a Martian colony would be if the initial constructors did not need oxygen, food, downtime, or sleep. Once there was air, and water available humans could do the interior decoration.
“Those new Optimuses + Starships can then be sent to yet more star systems, repeating the process.”
I think for a moment you forgot that Starship isn’t, well, a *starship*. It’s a chemical rocket with barely enough delta V to get into orbit. (I swear, if Musk ever does invent a starship, he’ll call it “Intergalactic ship”.)
If the Optimus robot, in combination with factories, powerplants, and mines, constitutes a self-replicator, you still need to design much, much better propulsion systems. Optimus is just part of the system, and Starship is likely just a temporary crutch.
Optimus isn’t the replicator, it’s just a key component of the replicator.
And a key point that’s often ignored is that the entire production process for just about anything isn’t fully publicly documented. There’s a lot of ‘black art’ passed on from practitioner to practitioner, proprietary tech retained by companies all across the industrial ecosystem and not externally documented.
We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us to produce a real self-replicator, even if Optimus is everything it’s sold to be.
But it’s work worth doing, because (And this has been my theme for decades.) self replication really IS the key to conquering space, we’re never going to manage without it.
We already have self replication, using free biological labor (as an added benefit they enjoy their work!).
Seriously, “conquest” of space by artificial robots is a hollow enterprise. Exploration by spiritual creatures, who spring spontaneously out of the universe, fulfills its destiny. Robots can help though.