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.

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.

Warning! Speculative Applications

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. To make them behave acceptably a lot of additional software will be needed. Those front ends may be mix and meshable like linux distributions. Beside being eery it might be dangerous to give "the internet" a body.

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 any ethical rules.

• sensory richness ...
• stability ...

Also there arise some 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"

Artificial neuronal intelligences

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