The Santa Claus Machine

Physics of the Future. How Science will shape Human destiny in Our Daily Lives by the Year twenty one hundred, by Michio Kaku. Kaku predicts what the world will be like in one hundred years based on interviews from over three hundred top scientists from computers to robots to medicine. Kaku predicts an exciting future world. That's Physics of the Future, How Science will shape Human destiny in Our Daily Lives

by the year twenty one hundred, available from Audible. To try Audible free today and to get a free audiobook of your choice, go to Audible podcast dot com slash mind stuff. That's Audible podcast dot com slash mind stuff. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and if you're listening to this episode. Uh, ideally you're listening to it during a holiday season, when this is like a cheerful kind of a thing, like, oh, Santa, It's kind of need to do in a Christmas holiday

kind of episode. That's awesome because if you're listening to it in March, you're kind of like, oh, that's a Christmas episode. Or maybe maybe you even skipped it. I don't know. That's the danger of of seasonally specific episodes. But hang on, don't don't leave us if you are listening to this in July or something. Because we're getting down to some of the the science or the theoretical

science of Santa Um. We have a really good UM article or two on the How Stuff Works website to deal with some of this, like how is Santa Slay actually work? And it's kind of fun to to take something that's magical like Santa Claus and try and translate into the real world. How would Santa Clause travel around the world in a single night? How would reindeer pull a sway through the air? Um? And one of the big ones, how does he make all those toys? Is

it really dependent on elf labor? Where is there may be something a little more science going on. Oh, there's something more science going on for sure, something I dare say dangerous going on. Actually that could be menacing, right, we'll talk about it. I mean it depends on how do you think Santa Claus is the right person to command this technology? Or I mean is it safe? Do we need to see about securing it? I see, And this is a podcast where we will take you from

Santa Claus to the singularity. Don't think we could do it, but we will from Santa Claus to possibly the end of the world in one night. Let's begin. So toys, if you've ever watched like an old Timmy Santa Claus film that tries to depict a toy manufacturing facility, they're generally making really basic toys. Stop animation. Yeah, it's elves

hammering together some stuff. And sometimes it will be like children only get three or four things, like I think like in Santa Claus versus the Martians, it's like there's the doll, there's the bat, there's the you know, it's there's not a lot of variety. And the Martian kids did need it, but need a lot of variety and their gifts. But but ideally, if you had Santa Claus

actually bringing gifts to everyone, he would need a universal constructor. Yes, he would need a device that's not unlike the technology see on Star Trek when they when they go in, they push a button and any food comes out of their little microwave like device. The idea that you would have a machine that could build anything, anything from the

bottom up. Anything dog food turns into a lovely dress, right, yeah, in theory, in theory, yeah, they could build everything and everything from an iPhone to um, you know, a wooden horse too. I don't even like a puppy or something becau Santas to Clus sometimes brings live animals and possibly I'm just thinking about that. We were talking about stem

cell generated organs. Why not a dog son out of that um So basically, to me, it's like a computer version of a golem, a computer that constructs at our bidding, but does so autonomously. And this is this is sort of a theoretical framework that we're talking about, but this is something that people want and actually, Philip might come into play some day in the future, right right, We've we've spoken a little in the podcast episodes about nano manufacturing.

The idea of using nanotechnology and building things from the bottom up at the smallest level. The idea that if you're if you're building something at a molecular level UM or an atomic level, the way nature builds things, then you can build anything. Right. So the smaller the particle of the more you can manipulate it. Right. It's not like what can I build out of wood? It's what can I build out or even what can I build

out of some sort of iron um molecules. You're dealing in an even lower level, like a base level, to where everything is possible. So this is the universal Constructor. John von Neuman, a Hungary Hungarian American mathematician, created a proposal centered around the combination of a universal constructor, which could make anything it was directed to make, in a universal computer which could compute anything it was directed to compute.

This combination provides immense value because it can be reprogrammed to make any of a wide range of things UM. So we could do it um at a very low cost, right, which would be really important. And the ability of the device to make copies of itself, which would just simply be a means to achieve low cost, rather than the

ability to continue to to stamp out versions of itself. Right. Yeah, that the idea of the self replicating machine especially is is kind of like the Holy Grail and the also the the ultimate um nightmare, right because but it's like the Holy Grail, and that that's what life does. I mean, the whole point of life as a as a larger

concept and not just you know, goldfish or humans or cactus. Uh. It self replicates, like its whole programming is to make more copies of itself and make and make better copies of itself that will continue to to copy and copy and copy forever. So there's two issues with the universal constructor. One is the ability to have this sort of like uh Ford assembly line on steroids, right, to continue to

punch out products. But then there's the other idea where it has the self replicating technology that it just begins to make copies of itself. Right, So all of a sudden, you have a universe that's populated by universal constructors. Yes, and my mom jumping ahead of a bit much, but just to see where we're going with this idea, right,

because that's that's the whole thing. It's like, if you had a universal constructor, you can make another universal constructor, right, and it would be really helpful if you were going to construct something like the Dyce and Fear right, like we've talked about. Here's this idea about the Dyson Fear sphere that you could you know, harness the energy of

another planet. You could build another habitat. But you have to have the technology for obviously, you can't send a bunch of people up there to do, you know, to Mars for instance, to do this. Yeah, and especially if you're talking about building mega structures to be at a and a particularly enormous skyscraper, a space elevator, or some sort of structure that you know, encloses a star or something. You're talking about taking the mass of planets and and

transforming them into say, you know, carbon nanotubes. Yeah. Yeah. And actually the person who termed the Santa Class machine, physicist Ted Taylor, said, quote, it is possible to imagine a machine that could scoop up material rocks from the Moon or rocks from asteroids, process them, process them inside, and produce just about any product washing machines or teacups

or automobiles or starships. Once such a machine exists, it could gather sunlight and materials that it's sitting on and produce on call whatever product anyone wants to name, as long as somebody knows how to make it, and those instructures can be given to the machine. I think the name Santa Class machine for such a device as appropriate.

Of course you would. So then again we you've got the guy John von Newman, and um, he's trying to figure out this hypothetical machine, and he succeeds in figuring it out, at least theoretically, when he found a mathematical model for such a machine with very complicated rules on a rectangular grid. So it's based on a cellular automating a mathematical grid of cells that exists in a finite number of states, such as like an on or off position. Okay, And it kind of it comes back to, um, I

think the whole, the whole thing about nanotechnology. The smaller the building blocks that you used to create something, the more command you have over the properties of the materials and then ultimately the things that those materials composed. Right, And I mean this has really taken off, especially in the seventies. People took this idea and they sort of ran with the cellular automating, and in fact, there's something called Conway's Game of Life, and this was created by

British mathematician John Horton Conway. He created the game of Life based on cellular automating and described by John von Newman. A person essentially interact with a model by creating an initial configuration and then observes how it evolves. So this isn't a mathematical model, right, we're talking about computer science here, and it's really cool because it's a it's been a crowdsourcing sort of event, and people have created some really

amazing theoretical models based on this. And what he did is he took of this idea that von Newman had and he created simple rules rather than complex rules. Okay, so he made sort of a miniature version of this um and the simple rules lead to emergence or self organized structures. And current developments have gone so far as to create theoretic emulations of computer systems within the confines of a life board. And Conway chose his rules really carefully.

He said, one, there should be no explosive growth in these models. Okay, there should exist small initial patterns with chaotic unpredictable outcomes, there should be potential for a von Newman universal constructor constructor, right, because that's really the that the end all of what we want to get to here. The rules should be as simple as possible whilst adhering

to all the above constraints. Okay, this is a gigantic thought experiment that eventually could get us to a place where it would have real world applications, right if that. Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has used the analog of Conway's life universe extensively to illustrate the possible evolution of complex philosophical constructs such as consciousness and free will from um this sort of simple set of deterministic physical laws that

govern our own universe. So there's this idea that that free will consciousness was is a self organizing principle based on simple rules. Yeah, which means that I don't know, you know, to when we talked about this all the time, but you know whether or not free will really exists? You know, if there's uh these simple rules and only certain amount of outcomes are possible, then is it really free will? So again, this whole idea of universal constructor

heavily theoretical, not experiment, but what if it actually did exist? Right, what we actually were able to create a machine, not in our lifetime. But let's not yet, not even not

creating this little thing. But uh, but yeah, let's say nano technology really takes off next hundred two hundred, three hundred years, right, we end up the amount of freedom that we have over what we can do at the nano scale, the things that we can make eventually reaches the point where we can make virtually anything out of anything,

out of anything. I mean it all comes to you cannot matter, Energy cannot be created or destroyed, be transferred, So you would have to have matter to transform into more matter. It's kind of like your your dog has to eat something if it's gonna go to the bathroom, right, I mean, it's just transfer right. Uh. The an atomic

explosion is is matter becoming energy and all this. So for this machine to work, you would have to say, all right, Santa, Santa has this right, he needs to make toys, So he as the elves bring in, uh, I don't know, a mountain top that they've harvested, and they put the mountain top in a machine, and now he can transfer x amount of mass into x amount of presence the mass, it's the same. I don't know.

He might lose or gain some energy in there somewhere, but I mean, he could even throw an elf in there. I mean, I'm not trying to get dark, but that's that's really what we're talking about, a society where every raw material could be repurposed to make a finished good with this universal constructor. Um, so what happens to big box retailers, right, Um? Presumably they become extinct, they become a small box, they become right that sits right next

to you, and there's only one small box. Yeah, yeah, um. And so it also kind of makes a question about what happens to original design or even intellectual property, right because what we're talking about here again is a mass production, the ability to to take almost anything and not not only just feed it to a machine and and get something on the other side, but the design elements would have to be in there. I can't help but think

about my Space in this. Remember how I don't know if you were ever on on the my Space back in the day. Uh No, I wasn't, but I'm familiar with it, and I I know that sort of um, well, it seems like the web ridden cave that it is now. Well you remember how some of you may remember how

it started off. It seems like all the profiles were pretty clean, and I don't know if people were I don't remember if people were were given the power to change and customize their profiles over time, or if they merely learned how to do it, or probably a mix of column A and column B. But emergence, Yeah, it got to the point where people's profiles were just unreadable because they were they were adding like glitter script and changing the fonts in the background, and adding animations and

video and sound, and it just became a nightmare where you'd like go to somebody's profile and it would like crash the computer or or your brain just trying to look at it. So, you know, in Facebook has been pretty ingenious and is avoided a lot of that by limiting what you can do to the profile. It's the Conway game of life. Yeah, yeah, I mean simple rules rights, the constraints are pretty yeah. Yeah. You give people enough creative rope there, they are going to hang themselves and

create an unreadable profile. So the idea of a universal constructor where there there is no big box, there's no there's basically no mass production anymore. Do people end up just having horrible things that they've customed to. You're talking about like the Etsy of of I don't mean to say that a lot of Etsy is good, but if anybody has ever gone to regrets dot com, you know exactly what I'm talking about, the regret c flacation of life itself exactly. It's possible there could be like, uh,

you know, pink boa is coming. I don't know where pink Boas came from, but generally they're not I think that they were Jesse Ventura. Yeah, yeah, nice, you get your wrestling thing in there. But so anyway, yeah, I mean there's this idea that there could be a lot of bad design, and only that that you would spend your life feeding the machine with whatever resource you had.

And then here's where things get particularly dark. If the machines start to self replicate, which at point, at that point they'd be able to write, okay, because we're talking in the far far away land. The mission of a self replicating robot would be, you know, to continue to create versions of itself, and then you need more energy and matter to do this because we end up in like a matter economy or a mass economy. Yes, yes, yeah, I mean you know, currency is now dirt or or

whatever material you can find. And not only that, you have a population that could be, you know, much more machine dominated than human dominated. And that's where the singularity always comes in. Right, So I mean basically, what I'm talking about here is the armageddon that could be ushered in by machines that are just gobbling up all the resources, including us. Right, So let's go back to the North Pole. You're at Senta's. You're trying to take it to the

nice place again. No, well we're gonna We're gonna go through the nice place to the darkness. That's all right. So it's Santa's laboratory, his workshop. However, you want to look at it, because all it has in it is that universal manufacturing device. So this nano manufacturing wonder machine. And Santa has taken off early because he's a little tired,

and he's left one elf in charge. And the elf h does something wrong with the settings, like he he accidentally flips it over, or he spills a little eggnog on the keyboard and it goes hey wire. So suddenly it's making a copy of itself. That is, that suddenly makes a copy of itself, and it's making a copy of itself, and it's self replicating without end. It's like a it's like a cancer cell, except it's transferring matter. And suddenly elves are disappearing right and left is they're

sucked into the machine. Then the then it's like ice and polar bears, and then where does it end. We end up with this gray goose scenario. Right, this is the nano apocalypse, the idea that you could create nano machines or some sort of nano manufacturing device that ends up transforming all available matter into itself to where it's just a nothing but nano machines everywhere. It's just at what looks like gray goo covering the entire earth, and

eventually is the earth well. And that's the interesting part of it, that's right, is that there's this ability to imitate. So it's very possible that all of a sudden you have machines that are able to imitate us, imitate uh, flora, fauna. And you know what I'm saying, it's not just replacing of the human being or even using humans as um as fuel, but but just sort of taking over the

earth and in as many ways as possible. Well, indeed, you can go crazy on this and say that this apocalyptic Christmas that we're describing actually happened millions of years ago, and then after the gray goose scenario occurred, the gray go like reformed itself into some approximation of century life. Alright, kids, I know you're you're shaking your heads. Gonna happen, But

we were talking about, you know, nanotechnology. We're talking about nano carbon tubes that are a hundred times stronger than steel and just tinier than a thread of hair. Yeah, the seeds have already been planted. It's just a question of how big will the nano tree grow and will it consume her happy holidays? All right, well, let's uh, let's call the robot over here. Surely we have time for a quick quick listener mail from the mail folder.

You won't call the robot, Arnie William I'm still warming up to the idea that this robot as a person. So this one says, dear Santa. Oh, this is a Santa letter. I mean, these are all Santa letters. Wait and take this back, Arnie. All right, now, okay, now I have the right folder. Here's one from Robert different Robert Obviously it's not not me, Um, Robert him, hear me, Hi, Robert new Julie. I'm sitting in my car right now.

Don't panic. I got to work early. I love the podcast, and I'm currently listening to the Quest for Cyber Immortality. And I want to let you know that I have seen this concept twice in fiction, both times to very creepy effect. The first example is in the Orson Scott Card novel Speaker of the Debt, which I actually just finally bought that the other day for like a nickel.

I love used bookstores. Um. In this story, the protagonist goes through the universe, effectively living hundreds of years via relativistic travel, and seeks out the dead whose memory is being perverted. He does he does extensive research with the help of a galaxy spanning AI, and then performs the ceremony in which he represents the dead person as accurately and fairly as possible. The second example is from Doctor Who,

Let's be honest, what haven't they done anyway? In the episode Forest of the Dead, astronauts consciousnesses are briefly preserved in their communications equipment, a phenomenon called ghosting. I find it interesting that there are these two opposite ideas about memory, the terrifyingly tragic ghosting and the catharsis of speaking for the debt. They make me wonder whether any middle ground is possible there. Thanks for reading, and if you use this in the show, give a shout out to my

friend Matt for recommending the podcast. Thanks, and indeed thanks Matt for turning your friends onto our podcast. So word of mouth, that's the big way it spreads, like like nanoparticles,

self replicating or viruses. Yeah. So if you have some holiday cheer you would like to share with us, or something about the end of the world, or just do some general ramblings about I mean with the big thing about our I love about our podcast is the idea that gets people's brains moving and gets people thinking about the philosophical or futuristic implications on the subject. So which gets us percolating. Yeah, yeah, so share it with us.

You can find us on Facebook as stuff to Blow the Mind, and our handle on Twitter is blow the Mind. And you can always write a letter to Santa, send it to us and we'll afford it on And you can do that at below the Mind at how staf works dot com. This podcast is brought to you by Audible dot com, the Internet's leading provider of audiobooks, with more than and downloadable titles across all types of literature and featuring audio versions of many New York Times bestsellers.

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