Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote: In a few hundred years, the coastal nations of the world will be required > to move their coastal cities inland 100 miles more or less to keep their > cities above water. Robots cannot do that sort of construction. >
They cannot do it now. What makes you think they will not be able to do it in 200 years? Given the progress they have made in the last 30 years I think it is inevitable they will. Look how well a robot can explore Mars. I predict they will be far better at construction than people are, just as today they are better at assembling automobiles. Unless you know of some specific technical limitation, material shortage, law of nature, or some other factor that will prevent progress toward a given goal, it is safest to assume that progress will continue and the goal will be met. There is no indication that robots are inherently unable to do any phase of construction. The fact that they cannot do it at present means nothing. You might as well say that Celani's cell produces only 15 W so we know that similar devices cannot produce petawatt levels needed to power the entire earth. The Curies' radioactive samples produced a fraction of a watt of heat, but it turned out you could make a 50 gigaton bomb out of similar radioactive materials, and you could power every machine on earth with uranium. My all-time favorite quote about this, always worth repeating: "Eighty-five percent of the horse-drawn vehicle industry of the country is untouched by the automobile. In proof of the foregoing permit me to say that in 1906 - 7, and coincident with an enormous demand for automobiles, the demand for buggies reached the highest tide of its history. The man who predicts the downfall of the automobile is a fool; the man who denies its great necessity and general adoption for many uses is a bigger fool; and the man who predicts the general annihilation of the horse and his vehicle is the greatest fool of all." - The Keynote Speaker at the National Association of Carriage Builders, 1908, the year the Model T Ford went into production - Jed
