[ExI] Vinge finally cracks the NYT

[Bryan Bishop]

On Thursday 28 August 2008, Emlyn wrote:
> > ps- I think this is the first time I've ever posted to exi-chat,
> > but I've been reading for years.  Hi, all!  I can't even begin to
> > explain how much I've learned from all of you, how much I
> > appreciate that, or how amazing I still find it that things such as
> > transhumanist mailing lists actually exist.  I have to pinch myself
> > sometimes to remind myself that, similarity to the political and
> > social tools Card introduced me to when Peter and Valentine blogged
> > their way to global dictatorship be damned, I'm actually *not*
> > suddenly living in a science fiction novel.  :-)
>
> Cool, thanks for posting. Awesome reply too, I've just been talking
> about reprap and 3d "prototyping" with work colleagues.

The mechanical engineering students here at UT Austin are familiar with 
RepRap based on my somewhat random sampling. We have some rapid 
prototypers sitting in a building based off of the laser + sand 
methods. Maybe we can get a fablab with actlab or something. I started 
at the university as of yesterday, so it's an interesting change from 
people on the verge of the know to the who are the know.

> There is a good chance, it seems to me, that sooner rather than later
> we'll start to see solar based home energy systems which produce a
> lot more power than they do now, for a lot less money. And that this
> will move from "a lot more" up to "everything a home could use".
> [citation needed]

Buckminster Fuller and the Whole Earth Catalog is your citation.

> Now, our 3d printer can make widgets. Assuming it does an ok job, it
> has the benefit that you can get designs online from the iWidget
> store, or FreeWidget.org, or bittorrent of course. You can modify it
> if you like (I'd like my new doorknob in pink). And it's cheapish to
> produce because you didn't pay for shipping, or energy costs, or the
> overheads of vertically integrated mega corps, just a feedstock
> cartridge and possibly the design if you are feeling like an
> especially good little consumer. And, this is big, and you know that
> no slave labour was involved, and no brown coal was burned. Your new
> widget isn't a symbol for Damage.

Emlyn, in our other recent discussion you admitted an ignorance to some 
software tools like apt-get and other software repository hubs out 
there on the net at the moment (no biggie, just bringing this up for a 
second). They're currently considering a reimplementation of the 
apt-get architecture with something called 'debtorrent'. Take a look:

> What are the issues? Why is it so important to go "distributed"?
>
> Debian is the largest independent of the longest-running of the Free
> Software Distributions in existence. There are over 1000 maintainers;
> nearly 20,000 packages. There are over 40 "Primary" Mirrors, and
> something like one hundred secondary mirrors (listed here - I'm
> stunned and shocked at the numbers!). 14 architectures are supported
> - 13 Linux ports and one GNU/Hurd port but only for i386 (aww bless
> iiit). A complete copy of the mirrors and their architectures,
> including source code, is over 160 gigabytes.
>
> At the last major upgrade of Debian/Stable, all the routers at the
> major International fibreoptic backbone sites across the world
> redlined for a week.
>
> To say that Debian is "big" is an understatement of the first order.
>
> Many mirror sites simply cannot cope with the requirements.
> Statistics on the Debian UK Mirror for July 2004 to June 2005 show
> 1.4 Terabytes of data served. As you can see from the list of mirror
> sites, many of the Secondary Mirrors and even a couple of the Primary
> ones have dropped certain architectures.
>
> security.debian.org - perhaps the most important of all the Debian
> sites - is definitely overloaded and undermirrored.
>
> This isn't all: there are mailing lists (the statistics show almost
> 30,000 people on each of the announce and security lists, alone), and
> IRC channels - and both of those are over-spammed. The load on the
> mailing list server is so high that an idea (discussed informally at
> Debconf7 and outlined here later in this article, for completeness)
> to create an opt-in spam/voting system for people to "vet" postings
> and comments, was met with genuine concern and trepidation by the
> mailing list's maintainers.
>
> It's incredible that Debian Distribution and Development hasn't
> fallen into a big steaming heap of broken pieces, with
> administrators, users and ISPs all screaming at each other and
> wanting to scratch each others' eyes out on the mailing lists and IRC
> channels, only to find that those aren't there either.
>
> So it's basically coming through loud and clear: "server-based"
> infrastructure is simply not scalable, and the situation is only
> going to get worse as time progresses. That leaves "distributed
> architecture" - aka peer-to-peer architecture - as the viable
> alternative.
>
> This problem has been recognised for quite some time, in fact,
> Debtorrent's Wiki page describing the motivation and history point
> out that Debtorrent was done as a 2006 Google "Summer of Code"
> project. Debtorrent hints at the tantalising possibility of being
> able to reduce or entirely replace the present "http", "ftp" and
> "rsync" download methods for individual packages, leaving jigdo and
> bittorrent as the method for downloading CDs, DVDs, netboot images.
> Even other methods could be adapted to use distributed download
> methods.
http://advogato.org/article/972.html
See also: http://p2pfoundation.net/

So what I'm doing with a few others at the moment is working on some of 
those issues when it comes to manufacturing and design etc. There's a 
way to use this sort of system to aggregate the self 
identifying "maker" community (the one that would still exist even 
without the Make/O'Reilly brand) and have all of the contributions and 
packages link together in the same way that it works for debian. Except 
instead of downloading your software, you just downloaded your 
bread-and-toast machine thingy or I honestly don't know what you would 
want. Maybe an in vitro meat machine? Perhaps a new doorknob for 
starters.

There was a site I once saw that was aptly named. One of the biggest 
distributions of linux in the world is ubuntu at the moment, it's based 
off of debian and is well known. So, the site I found was something 
like: http://fabuntu.org/ which tries to be the operating system of the 
fablab / fab at home idea. But it kind of doesn't take itself as seriously 
as it should -- just as there's "print servers" there should 
be "fabrication servers" (on the network) to interface with the 
machinery (and this is, in fact, what happens on the factory floors. Or 
at least if the consultants did things correctly ..).

> Back toward the original message I'm replying to: I'm thinking
> hyper-exponential knowledge and social connectedness online, nurtured
> by the free culture movement and commercial interests in more or less
> equal parts, as the accelerant. Throw in 3d printing and possibly
> self rep. Add sustainable energy use from greener power sources, at
> least in the domestic sphere. And toss in consumer robotics, and a
> hydrogen economy. Great Scott! (Biotech should be in here too I
> think, but my impression at the moment is that it's being pwned by
> our broken IP rules).

Mmm, the biotech is doing well on its own. I'm seeing personally to 
that, such as through the toolkit I released a while back. Others are 
doing really amazing things too. Look out for pinkarmy.org coming out 
later this year. It's personalized medicine using a computational and 
physical toolchain to do N=1 cancer battles.

> The former boils down to us recognising that the sphere of scarcity
> is limited. While it will always be there, the set of all things
> scarce is shrinking in a relative sense at least and should be
> encouraged to continue shrinking. This is imho a prerequisite for us
> to proceed into the longer future without destroying ourselves, or
> maybe more positively I could say it is the path of maximum value,
> maximum net benefit to all.

Would you consider turning this into a paper for an upcoming journal?

- Bryan
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