I've Heard About Node 1

A viab would produce structures that are not set and specific, but impermanent and malleable - merely viable - made of a uniform, recyclable substance like adobe. The automaton's output would have no innate design, boundaries, or service life. It would take whatever form was called for at the moment - a great rotting blooming stony bubble of a building that, unlike all previous forms of human habitation, would be unplanned, responsive, densely monitored, massively customized, and rock-solid, with all modern conveniences.


The closest thing to a viab today is a small, modest mud-working robot invented by Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of engineering at the University of Southern California. Khoshnevis' "contour crafter" works more or less like a 3-D printer, but it's meant to assemble whole buildings. Its nozzle spits wet cement while a programmable trowel smoothes the goo into place. Roche encountered Khoshnevis, and his agile imagination immediately started pushing the idea toward its limits.

Sterling's science fiction writerly imagination brings poetry to "crap houses." His early cyberpunk stories imagined things like viabs on Mars, inside asteroids, etc.
- tom moody 2-10-2005 6:26 pm [add a comment]

previously posted on the subject of crap houses


- bill 2-10-2005 6:48 pm [add a comment]