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MrGate t1_j477a95 wrote

I highly doubt we will have real programable matter in our lifetimes.

is it possible, yeah. are we close to it. no.

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SoylentRox t1_j49mwr7 wrote

See the singularity hypothesis.

See the research that suggests our cells can actually heal their aging damage with a simple command (3 yamaka factors) . Why don't they self heal? Because we live long enough that there's apparently not sufficient benefit for nature to develop the mechanism to emit the command, too many of us died to the environmental causes and this wouldn't heal some types of damage like scars or missing fingers, etc.

So it's possible. But sure, even if programmable matter were real, like, a drone bringing you a chair and taking away your unwanted stool or whatever might be a better and cheaper way to handle this. There are a lot of drawbacks to programmable matter. It won't be as strong or light as something custom made out of the materials needed. Or as cheap.

Drone based delivery - basically what we already have except instead of a human unloading the amazon van it's a robot - and robotic based recycling (being prototyped) might give you all the benefits of programmable matter in a much simpler way.

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MrGate t1_j49vlxa wrote

I dont think you can really compare human cells and programmable matter tbh.

but id disagreee to the being as strong or light, as their is various factors of the property of a material based on how its arranged at the atomic scale.

it all would really depend on the programmer who will write the program to make said object.

and in theory their could be hundreds of programmable matters. each with unique traits that can connect together etc.

like say a part of an object you need, needs to be flexible, but the shell around it needs to be hard and conductive.

so a rubber/plastic programmable matter and a copper or steel like programmable matter would connect together to create said object

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SoylentRox t1_j49wqxg wrote

Maybe. It's still made of little robots latching themselves together. Not really the sci Fi concept of programmable matter, just a smaller version of those robots various labs show swarming together.

The guts of each robot is not contributing to the properties you want. So the item might have to be thicker, heavier, or harder than it could be.

I think I gave a pretty clear and simpler way to accomplish the same thing. Programmable matter will be used but only when it's a good way to accomplish a task.

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