Navy to Build Robots - Some likely to be gay

The U.S. Navy is planning a project to develop the technologies necessary to deploy a swarm of self replicating robots. Here are the details. There is no way this could possible go wrong. Were Eric Drexler dead he would be spinning in his own pile of grey goo. That was a nanotechnology joke. Don't worry. I don't expect you to get it.

I am all for scientific advancement, and I totally hang with the "Robots are Cool" crowd (even as we nerdishly but halfheartedly mock the "Sweet Party Last Night/Who did you hook up with" crowd). But I get a little nervous when it comes to the whole self-replication thing. Natural self-replication comes with a safety valve. Things age and then they die. The faster something reproduces, the quicker it dies. Some people should try and take a lesson from that. But if we want an efficient swarm of military construction bots, we are not likely to build in a "Get old and die" mode. I guess the good news is that this is after all a Navy project, so even though it will likely cost billions and consume thousands of man-hours, it will ultimately fail to deliver any actual results.