Multi limbed sensory equipped shells

By combining various diamondoid metamaterials one could create completely artificial counterparts to animal bodies (including humans).

Forms

Humanoid

A "simple" copy of the human body. This is best suited for telepresence where an AP suit equipped with sensors (and actors) is used as the input device.

Environmentally adapted forms

• weightlessness / gravity adapted
• under-water

Artistic

Fashions change. Certain stereotypical looks will probably oversaturate and thereby create new fashion branches. Being thin once was associated with undernourishment now it is considered beautiful. Wrinkles or just plain sub standard normal looks might become desired.

Applications / Uses / Misuses

Telepresence

Like todays conventional robotics [1] artificial bodies could be used to virtually and instantaneously teleport to a distant location. In combination with force feedback suits this might feel like actually being there.

Advanced AP suits that are sufficiently equipped for telepresence share many traits with their robotic counterparts on the other end of the communication line.

Speculative Applications

Warning! you are moving into more speculative areas.
Development of the following systems is unrelated to the development of APM. Tampering with minds that potentially or certainly can experience feelings like humans raises serious ethical concerns. A better scientific understanding of the nature of feelings is desirable. Assuming emulated minds can experience pain and acting accordingly is a safe way to go.

Expert systems

Expert systems drawing information from web search engines like Google and knowledge databases like Wikipedia could be given a physical body and some "behavioral character module". To make them behave acceptably a lot of additional software will be needed. Those front ends may be mix and meshable like linux distributions. There arises the question: What are the dangers and opportunities of giving "the internet" a various set of bodies?

Human minds

Given sufficient understanding of the neuronal structure of body and brain architecture and suitable scanning technology it might become possible to scan frozen brains, plastinated brains or brains from recently deceased persons accurately enough to copy the mind in a working state into an artificial body.

Volunteers should be aware of the potential horrors since future experimantators may not adhere to any ethical rules.

• sensory richness ... (sufficient sensory perceptions)
• stability ...

Also there arise some seemingly paradox philosophical questions about continuity of perception like

• How close must the copy resemble the original to experience something like "waking up"?
• If multiple copies are "switched on" which one is the most likely to be "experienced"?
• Is quantum random (not quantum computing!) involved in our thinking? Assuming Everett's multiple world interpretation of quantum mechanics is true we should probably make sure that our brains can take different paths in different "worlds" especially if there are several paths of decision that seem equally desirable.

For some aspects robots for humanoid telepresence can be used to check in how far upward compatibility in senory perception is reached. Meaning a human consciousness doesn't get sensory deprived when connected to the environment through such a robot.

Artificial neuronal intelligences

This could be considered deliberately creating feeling life with all its ethical consequences.

Sensors

See page "Sensors"

The hollow baloon concept (dedicated page)

A concept that J. Sorrs Hall presented in his book "Nanofuture" are robots (e.g. humanoid) built like ballons possessing a strength akin to that of human muscles.

This should work because even very thin walls can be highly tear resistant and AP motors can have very high energy densities. What is less noted is that such thin shells pose very little resistance to bending and must not only be inflated to keep shape but also have some complex internal bracings (fractal structure?). This adds to the deflated "ballpoint pen volume". Approximating nice organic shapes is not easy. Shape shifting to the point of complete collapsability too (except a cloth like state is assumed that collapses rather disordered when deflated) Much programming effort will be neccesary to reach such a point. It's not a thing to expect early on.

Note that thin highly tear resistant cloth like materials (a simple deflated state of such a robot) always pose some danger (think: hairs in mills or necklace in wheels). Explosion of such a balloon inflated to one to a few bar e.g. due to thermal influence could endanger the sense of hearing of nearby people there souldn't be any debris flying around.

Related

• Gem-gum balloon products
• Gem-gum suit - these could act as input device for telepresence