Schmidhuber: AI-controlled general robots could achieve physical self-replication
SchmidhuberAI · x · 2026-09-08
Jürgen Schmidhuber weighs in on what's missing for true AGI, pointing to Sec. 20 of his book DLH: humans have discussed physical self-replicating machines (SRMs) for centuries—from Descartes through von Neumann and Zuse—but nobody knew how to build general-purpose physical SRMs in practice. He argues there is now an obvious way: AI-controlled general-purpose robots that learn to operate all machines and tools currently operated by humans could also build, operate, and repair the machines needed to make more robots, closing the loop from mining and refining raw materials to repairing broken 3D printers and robots.
Related event: Schmidhuber Rejects "AGI Is Here": No Physical-World Mastery, No AGI(8 posts)→
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