http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASMIndex.html

http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASMIndex.html

I just completed reading the pieces of this document that were online.
It unfortunately is a fundamentally flawed document and it is
understandable that it was quietly ignored. In fact if I had set out to

make a document that would cause the whole concept of unmanned
construction activity to be ignored, I couldn't have done a better job.

In many ways it is a product of the late 1970's: Assumptions that AI
would be a simple and quick answer for a variety of problems. A lot of
academic analysis to prove that it might be possible to use a given
solution with a lot more money given to the academic rather then
creative out of the box thinking (true of any age). And then there were

pages and pages dedicated to the fundamentals of cellular automata,
god's view of creating thinking machines, Asimov's Law's of robotics,
and concerns about self replicating machines taking over the world.
None of these subjects belonged in what should have been a straight
forward engineering analysis to say we can't do replicating machines
right now but here are alternative ways to do the same thing.

If this document had be taken seriously, there would have been a
justifiable media circus. It seems clear from reading it that the wrong

question had been asked and answered. From a 20 year retrospective it
seems that the people putting together this document told President
Carter what they thought he wanted to hear rather than using the
opportunity to move forward the concept of lunar construction projects.

Mitchell James
http://www.InnerTransit.org
mejames@...