This is a thread to discuss smaller waifu building problems, solutions, proposals and questions that don't warrant a thread. Keep it technical. I'll start.
Liquid battery and cooling in oneHaving a single "artificial blood" system for liquid cooling and power storage would eliminate the need for a vulnerable solid state battery, eliminate the need for a separate cooling system, and solve the problem of extending those systems to extremities.
I have heard of flow batteries, you'd just need to use a pair of liquids that's safe enough and not too sensitive to changes in temperature.
This one looks like it fits the bill. The downside is that your waifu would essentially be running on herbicide. (though from what I gather, it's in soluble salt form and thus less dangerous than the usual variety)
https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2017/02/long-lasting-flow-battery-could-run-for-more-than-decade-with-minimum-upkeepHow close are we to creating artificial muscles? And what's the second best option?Muscles are perfect at what they do; they're powerful, compact, efficient, they carry their own weight, they aren't dependent on remote parts of the system, they can be controlled precisely, and they can perform many roles depending on their layout alone.
We could grow actual organic muscles for this purpose already but that's just fucking gross, and you'd need a lot of extra bloat to maintain them.
What we need are strands of whatever that can contract using electrical energy. Piezo does the trick at small scales, but would it be enough to match the real thing? There have been attempts, but nothing concrete so far.
What are some examples of technology that one could currently use instead?
High level and low level intelligence emulationI've noticed a pattern in programs that emulate other computing hardware.
The first emulators that do the job at acceptable speeds are always the ones that use hacks and shortcuts to get the job done.
It comes down to a tradeoff. Analyzing and recompiling or reinterpreting the code itself on a more abstract level will introduce errors, but it is a magnitude of order more efficient than simulating every part of the circuitry down to each cycle. This is why a relatively high level emulator of a 6th gen video game console has close system requirements to a cycle-accurate emulator of the SNES.
Now, I want to present an analogy here. If training neural networks for every damn thing and trying to blindly replicate an organic system is akin to accurately emulating every logic gate in a circuit, what are some shortcuts we could take?
It is commonly repeated that a human brain has immense computing power, but this assumption is based just on the amount of neurons observed, and it's likely that most of them probably have nothing to do with intelligence or consciousness. If we trim those, the estimated computing power would drop to a more reasonable level. In addition, our computers just aren't built for doing things like neural systems do. They're better at some things, and worse at others. If we can do something in a digital way instead of trying to simulate an analog circuit doing the same thing, that's more computing power that we could save, possibly bridging the gap way earlier than we expected to.
The most obvious way to handle this would be doing as many mundane processing and hardware control tasks as possible in an optimized, digital way, and then using a GPU or another kind of circuit altogether to handle the magical "frontal lobe" part, so to speak.