[ExI] Vinge finally cracks the NYT

[Emlyn]

2008/8/28 Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com>:
> 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.

Grats, that sounds pretty stimulating. Me, I'm hardware challenged, so
more of an armchair speculator in this area :-(

>
>> 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:
[snip]

I love p2p :-) A p2p auto update system is a cool idea. You could do
it safely too, couldn't you, with digital signatures?

You know, I think the server model and the p2p model are artificial
distinctions. You're really talking about one-source vs many-source,
with the latter being a way for many machines to cooperate to provide
something or do something. A good model then may be "servers" and
"client machines", cooperating indiscriminately using p2p, so that we
have serious scalability. So "Server" becomes an increasingly abstract
concept; we really mean point-in-the-global-namespace, which maps in
some way onto a p2p morass.

I say this because I think there is a *lot* of server hardware in our
future. So much, that the big guys are now building them into sealed
shipping containers and just plugging in/out whole container sized
modules. eg:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10020902-75.html?hhTest=1

Following from this, I've noticed that at a consumer level, server
resources are passing into the non-scarce, non-monetary realm. Try
starting a video blog using only free online tools. If you've never
done it but have some idea about news feeds, you can put together
something excellent in a few hours, and it'll cost you $0 . What
boggles the mind is that storage may be cheap, but it's not free.
Video == fairly big storage. Also, video == processing costs. It used
to be that the free stuff was crippled and bad, but now it's the best
stuff available.

So it may be in our near future that some amount of server resources
become effectively free. I don't know how that works economically, but
I don't know how now works economically either. Or, we're in a bubble
and it bursts, that happens too iirc.

>
> 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.

Do you think you need a system as powerful for hardware designs as you
need for software? Software is a special domain, because it has
incredibly complex dependencies. Hardware models would seem to me,
otoh, to look more like music or video or text; relatively standalone
files/sets of files describing the thing. So do you need much more
than standard p2p or a standard file repository type website for that?

>
> 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 ..).

Do you need a whole specialised OS to do fabbing? Why is it not just
application software + drivers?

>
>> 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.
>

Nice to hear it, very cool.

>> 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?
>

Hmm, well I've started working on it on my new blog point7, but it's
at an early stage. I have a lot of ideas (next post is details on how
money violates reciprocal altruism, detail), so a lot of writing to
do, but I feel a lack of expertise in many areas surrounding it.
Especially regarding references; currently I'm just coallescing most
stuff out of my dodgy brain. I could really do with help from anyone
who's interested, in fact, but best to wait until I've blurted out
more. Actually if anyone is really interested in helping, come poke my
blog with a stick, tell me why I'm wrong.

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com - my home
http://point7.wordpress.com - downshifting and ranting
http://speakingoffreedom.blogspot.com - video link feed of great talks
on eCulture
http://actualizer.wordpress.com - for doing stuff