How are you driving Open Manufacturing and how can we help?

[Nathan W. Cravens]

Here's a big ice breaking question: "What is your name and what part
do you play in Open Manufacturing?" And secondly, "How can we come
together as a community and help you?"

We can assume the response to these questions could follow the format
of an Alcoholic's Anonymous meeting, but without the anonymity, and in
stark contrast, not attempt to avoid one's addiction to the topic at
hand. This is a way for us to get to know about what it is we do in an
attempt to spark further conversation.

I encourage you to invite those of you that know others related to
Open Manufacturing to request they step forward, tell a bit on
themselves, and admit they have an addiction -- and that it is okay.
We understand, or at least, we are trying to. So in that vein, I'll
begin my confessional.


My name is already written, so let's suppose I shan't say what it is.
Over a year ago I formulated the concept of Effortless Economy to
describe and observe the particular trends of 'zero-point
competition,' a particular evolutionary activity I first sensed, then
witnessed all around me as I began to look, namely at the things made
closer and closer to zero financial cost most prominently observed in
the computer hardware industry and software industry, but also
observable in the labor markets of the United States, where wages have
stagnated at best for the past few decades followed by a majority that
began tumbling into debt sometime in the early 1990s. Its not simple
retail workers getting jipped by self checkout kiosks either, labor
stats show that in the early '10s management positions, a white collar
position, was in decline next in line with factory work. (Neil Baily,
Martin. Z. Lawrence, Robert. What Happened to the Great US Job
Machine?) Stephen Baker's The Numerati offers a telling story of the
Taylorization and automation of the service and information economies,
the last of the foreseeable labor markets.

These sorts of observable trends seem to strongly suggest that, once I
found a term for it, Effortless Economy was nearly inevitable. I
usually refer to Effortless Economy as an economic system that does
not require a workforce. An EE would be just a skip and a jig away
from a post-scarcity society, where all resources are created from a
minimal amount of physical resources. I don't believe an absolute post-
scarcity environment can exist, not unless we can somehow create
something out of the vacuum of nothingness. Placing the philosopher's
crown upon my head, I don't deny that possibility, but I do my best to
align with 'scientific evidence' and current understandings of what
various experts think is possible, building from there. An Effortless
Economy is a fully automated economy, from producer to user. Open
Manufacturing is crucial to making the productive apparatus we rely on
freely available without taking control by force or exploitation, or
even air tight reasoning. As labor economies fall off the productive
wagon, the sorts of open agencies we discuss will be of even greater
importance.

On January 19, 2008 I launched the Effortless Economy Institute with
the essay 'Toward an Effortless Economy' and began studying a variety
of fields mentioned on my EE bio. The Effortless Economy Institute was
formed to analyze trends in market activity that go toward zero with a
focus on labor markets and to observe social movements with the
potential to achieve abundance like the P2P Foundation and other
organizations that might not realize they are apart of the abundance
revolution, such as The Singularity Institute for Artificial
Intelligence, The Foresight Nanotech Institute, and OpenCog.

In another discussion session I'd like for us to compile a list of
(potential) abundance producing organizations with short descriptions
to be made available as a wiki at the P2P Foundation or elsewhere. We
could skip that discussion and fire it up now, of course. Michel? The
best compilation of Open Manufacturing I've found is 'Open Design
Communities for Physical Production' (http://www.p2pfoundation.net/
Category:Design). If there are other resource compilations on Open
Manufacturing, those are probably listed on that wiki? We can also
discuss how we might improve the page.

Sometime before attending the first conference on Artificial General
Intelligence in March, I started thinking of a way we might advance
toward an Effortless Economy sooner, and more importantly, as safe as
possible. Attending the conference and chatting with a variety of the
exceptionally minded greatly inspired further formulation of Mutually
Assured Production as an idea, to set the stage for creating an
Effortless Economy. I talked about EE with about four people, half of
them believed it would be possible. This seems pretty accurate
overall, because if I remember correctly, only about half believed
that a Technological Singularity would happen. This I think is due to
the ambiguity of the term Technological Singularity. Everyone at the
conference believed creating an AGI was possible with a show of hands
in response to the question. Once an AGI is created and copied like a
file is shared, it would seem we've but a few years (or less) away
from a Singularity as its often described. I read Ray Kurzweil's 'The
Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcends Biology'. I like the
title, but the subtitle I find rather disturbing to say the least. At
any rate, while reading the book, which spends a great deal of ink
noting how a variety of fields are accelerating 'exponentially' in
development, my reasoned faith in EE was set into motion. I wrote
'Toward an Effortless Economy' sometime after reading the book and
attending AGI-08. The shared invigorating possibilities of EE gave way
to MAP and it is here where Open Manufacturing comes in to help
stimulate the societal revolution.

So here's where I could use your help:

1) I'm interested in learning about Industrial and productive
organization, its history, and what networking methods work best and
what works poorly. I'd like to read everything I can get my hands on
(preferably free and digital) in this area. Perhaps you or someone you
know can create a reading list or provide some names for me to contact
to further explore that area?

2) What readings best describe Industry as it stands today? What are
the most prominent forms of manufacturing? How are products
manufactured, how are they distributed, what are the most common
managerial and strategic techniques used in business, ect? Who are the
most prominent in automating this field and making it the most
efficient system it can be? Those are the ones I want to keep an eye
on.

3) What fields and areas of interest do you think I might want to look
at?

I'll save other questions and manufacture many more in later
discussions. I look forward to having your feedback on some of the
questions above. Your help is our help.

I'd now like to conclude with a question that sympathizes with the
Open Design Communities for Physical Production wiki portion that
says, "We need female Makers and more diversity in our network..."
Yes, where are those great women knowledgeable of open manufacturing?
After all, they are the ones doing most of the work in producing
humans! As I study Industrial History, many written in the late 1800s
to early 1900s, I found quite a few female authors with expertise in
this field: Rolla Milton Tryon, Katharine Coman, Josephine Shaw
Lowell, and Courtney Robert Hall. When these women stopped writing in
the area of Industrial History you'll notice the economic conditions
within the countries they wrote worsened! So if we can somehow get
more women to write about production today, we can be most assured a
positive future. I suppose that means Naomi Klein is our only hope. ;)

[Bryan Bishop]

Nathan W. Cravens wrote:
> Here's a big ice breaking question: "What is your name and what part
> do you play in Open Manufacturing?" And secondly, "How can we come
> together as a community and help you?"

BTW -- the hplusroadmap mailing list is where the open manufacturing
talk occurs. I'm looking for a new relayhost at the moment. There's
200+ subscribers, and over 20 people showing up in the IRC channels.
Really, really need a relayhost guys. Any help?

On Monday 08 September 2008, "Nathan Cravens" <knu...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Effortless Economy (effortlesseconomy.com) is a little pet project
> that provided the intellectual stimulation for Mutually Assured
> Production.

I like the name of MAP. And it's indeed an 'effortless economy'. I
have
somehow wondered how anything can be "hard" (or requiring effort) in
general; what would make one moment of reality more 'hard' than any
other? So while I can sometimes fall effortlessly to the solutions of
ridiculously complicated mathematical problems, it still takes me
effort to be noneffortless.

> How might I be of help in your line of work? How would you briefly
> explain what it is you have done and would like as a long term
> outcome?

Two immediate things you can do:
1) Figure out 'git', start poking around in the git
repositories that I
mention below.
2) Show up on the IRC channel. Firefox has an IRC client
known
as 'Chatzilla' - otherwise I recommend 'irssi'. The server is
irc.freenode.net and the channel is #hplusroadmap.

There are many projects that I work on that all sort of converge in
their own special ways. One project in particular that could use some
immediate help (any sort of help, really) is the do-it-yourself
biotech
toolkit. I originally released it at http://biohack.sf.net/ but
there's
now a git repository on my server:
http://heybryan.org/biotech.git

You might find the git cheat sheet of help:
http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2007/09/git-cheat-sheet.html

The sort of work that needs to be done on the biotech toolkit is ..
drastic. There's many hundreds of megabytes of documents, images,
information etc. all spread out through the whole thing. Yikes. It
would help if it was more concise, more of a tutorial. It's not
received as much help as I was hoping it would. It would be fun to
include it in CD3WD, the 14 GB set of data that is sent out to the
3rd
world countries, maybe.

The other end of the biotech toolkit project is:
http://heybryan.org/new_exp.html
It's an actual bioreactor that is under design. The goal is to have a
mostly self-replicating project that by definition can make itself --
it's all biological, so it makes the promoters and it makes the
reagents (which are extracted from algae anyway) and so on. So
personal
fabrication could lead to transmitting the fabricator to friends and
others and so on (except perhaps the tank itself). One aspect of the
project is a "retarded polymerase" that has to be evolved via
directed
evolution. This "retarded polymerase" is effectively a biological DNA
synthesizer that responds to human input. I've been working on it off
and on, and theoretically we can get it to respond to light, and
theoretically we can evolve different polymerases to write only one
of
the four nucleotides, but the selected activation (only one
nucleotide
versus the other) with respect to laser light is still up in the air
IMHO. It would be interesting to start working on simulations to show
it working (the switching). There's a number of computational
packages
to help:
http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/Computational_chemistry
http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/Computational_biology
(You see, the four polymerases will have to be 'fused' together
somehow,
and this is verging on the realm of bioengineering where few dare to
be
seen guessing - this is what needs to be simulated.)

The page with information on the "retarded polymerase" is over at:
http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/Retarded_polymerase
http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/In_vitro_DNA_synthesizer

Diagram of the directed evolution aspect of the project:
http://heybryan.org/~bbishop/docs/ellingtonia/polymerase/retarded_polymerase/retarded_polymerase.png

I have many, many papers that are of relevance:
heybryan.org/~bbishop/docs/ellingtonia/polymerase/

Last summer I was working in a lab on, broadly, "the intersection of
computation and manufacturing", which turned out to be DNA
transcriptional switches. The project was funded by DARPA because the
guy who wrote the grant mentioned "growing tanks from seeds". The
multi-year goal was to get turing patterns on a liquid surface via
DNA
transcriptional logic switches, and then maybe get it to be in vitro
translation and have it making sugar crystals in weird (but
algorithmic) shapes with an exact genotype.

Obviously that's not going to be useful for personal fabrication in
the
short run. :-) But the biotech toolkit and reactor project might.

Michel found me on the internet for an entirely different reason:
http://heybryan.org/exp.html

The project going under the poor name of "SKDB", or societal
engineering
knowledge database, is very much like Neil Gershenfeld's "fablab" or
the "fabuntu" project. The original purpose of SKDB was to have this
giant database of parts that have metadata and thus connect to each
other in specialized ways, representing real components in the world,
with all of the instructions necessary to build any part and any
interconnection of parts, so as to figure out how to build a
self-replicating machine or von Neumann probe. This is not an ad hoc
strategy -- the idea was that a computer can do "closure engineering"
to make sure all processes can make all other processes included in
the
design for a self-replicator. But it's not really just a
computational
project -- it's a "fablab" in of itself. It doesn't replicate yet,
and
neither does the real fablab, but it's imaginable to have a set of
projects, parts, and tools that can be instructed to use each other
to
make the parts necessary to hand off the personal fabrication tools
to
another person (sometimes I like to imagine pushing a button on my
laptop and having a herd of women run in to my garage with all of the
components to do my latest projects, but alas). The bioreactor
project
mentioned above would very much definitely belong as a subset to this
project. There are parts to this project that mirror other things
that
have happened in the past. I don't know if you are aware of the old
UML-like meme called "agile manufacturing" or "reconfigurable
manufacturing". That concept is useful here, and as it turns out the
factories that attempted to implement reconfigurable manufacturing
kind
of failed because they were using it on production lines to
reconfigure "on demand" to produce different products or something,
and
it wasn't economical and so everyone hated the idea -- that's not
quite
the same scenario here, we're not on such tight deadlines. On debian,
there's a tool called "apt-get". It allows you to download software
that is prepackaged and has dependencies on other packages, just as
parts and tools have dependencies on other parts and tools. It's
perhaps the most useful feature of debian and ubuntu, and you can
easily imagine the concept of "apt-get install me a robotic arm". And
if you don't have the tools wired up to your computer(s) to actually
make a robotic arm, then it should be able to tell you that, and
what's
more it should be able to tell you the same instructions it would
have
told the machines, so that you can go make it yourself (or the
instructions to go make the tools to make the robotic arms; whatever).

Possibly relevant papers available here:
http://heybryan.org/~bbishop/docs/manufacturing/

Also see:
http://heybryan.org/manufacturing_ecology.html
http://heybryan.org/2008-05-09.html
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~nau/vm2/

I'm presently employed in the Automated Design Lab at UT Austin. The
project that I'm working on is, quite literally, automated design and
the scoring of different manipulations to the 'circuit' of
manufacturing processes (or parts) to figure out the degree to which
specialization of solvers matter. This is a small first step,
especially since it doesn't encompass bootstrapping issues (oops).
Three parts to fixing this minor setback:

1) Semantic Search Facilitator. Humbly began as my attempts to help
me
more quickly search with Google, and now I'm seeing it could also be
used with automated design tools to help a designer not have to
simulate 100,000 different designs and instead just help 'facilitate'
the automated generator process to some extent. This has many, many
ties to dynamic programming, backpropagating algorithms, and so on.
I'm
hoping this can be used to help others help bootstrap the system in
terms of the database of parts and perhaps also their use of it (see
#2).

2) SKDB / Automated design interface: synthetic biology circuit
creator -- using biobricks (which are equivalent to 'parts' in SKDB).
This has the doubleplus interesting point of being useful in making
the
bioreactor, as well as being useful for writing and managing for the
biotech toolkit git repository (now near 500 MB in size ..). It's
somewhat comparable to the search facilitator project, but not
entirely. I'm still working on the conceptual tie-ins, since I don't
want to spend time on silly overlaps. Some of the guys in
#hplusroadmap
came up with a mockup of what it might look like, I was going to go
off
and code it the other day but I got distracted with sleeping. (An
issue
still remaining is how do you specify the problem space to such an
interface? You don't just say "okay, I need to find all designs for a
house using N=50 parts, and no more than 100,000 designs" --
since 'house' is the thing you're designing it doesn't know what that
is, so that's not the right way to do user input for the 'seed' from
which the designs grow). Note that I'm planning on this being mostly
command-line shell scripts, but it wouldn't be hard to make it "web
2.0". See:
http://bloodgate.com/graph-demo/
http://bloodgate.com/graph-easy/
It's also conceivable to wire this 'circuit creator' system up to the
physical tools necessary to fabricate the circuit/design, especially
in
the biological domains. Also conceivable to wire up to purchase form
orders (see #3 re: sometimes needing money to do things).

3) Bootstrapping is going to require materials and resources that are
not yet "in the system". This means materials and machines might have
to be purchased or acquired via donations, scraps, whatever. We need
a
place to put/use all of this stuff. I've been given space at UT
Austin
to do this. One of the guys in #hplusroadmap ultimately wants to make
his own space habitats so that he can just go do his own thing, and
this has relations to SKDB's involvement in OpenVirgle (Google's
Project Virgle, a Mars colonization project) especially with respect
to
the simulator/game subproject of the time being. See, if you're
making
space habitats, or even just houses and homes, ideally all of the
technology for personal fabrication would be integrated into it, just
as we have the personal computer now integrated into the home. But if
you're on a space habitat, a spacebase of some sort, you're going to
have to acquire the energy and materials to keep you ticking.

Energy harvesting is something we know how to do these days. Material
harvesting has its own challenges. My point is that truly personal
fabrication might occur when we're able to harvest our own energy,
our
own materials, and transform it into sustenance using our own tools
and 'homes' (or whatever). In the mean time we can work on stuff like
building fablabs, getting artificial wombs and DNA synthesizers in
our
basements and such, but until we can completely 'close'
or 'encapsulate' the supply chain on our own, we're still very much
so
dependent on external processes. The goal is to enclose the supply
chain, and there's some staggard steps along the way. Do not read
this
document: http://heybryan.org/fractal.html especially since it's just
ranting. But it might help if you know what I'm talking about already.

Alright. Sorry for getting unorganized near the end there. As for
helping out on SKDB, keep asking me. Because of the recent
convergence
of many of these projects, I'm still sorting out details, like how to
integrate the automated design work into the search/design
facilitator
projects, and how to more formally start the bootstrapping process
(now
that I somewhat have space, there's a few more opportunities
available,
as you can tell). It was only a week ago that I learned about the
lab/shop space, you see, so I'm very excited.

- Bryan
________________________________________
http://heybryan.org/
Engineers: http://heybryan.org/exp.html
irc.freenode.net #hplusroadmap

[marcin_ose]

Hello,

We are developing the Global Village Construction Set.

http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=UM_Presentation

We are working on a set of technologies and means of post-industrial
digital fabrcation. Our experimental grounds are Factor e Farm -
Kansas City area, Missouri.

http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/?p=311

We are currently developing crowdsource funding options for fueling
world-class open source product research, development, and deployment,
as part of a prototype post-industrial village at Factor e Farm.

OSE-MidMissouri started as a student group at U. Missouri, Columbia,
and will be participating in Building a Village.

http://osemidmo.wiki-site.com/index.php/Main_Page#Open_Source_Ecology:_Mid-Missouri

We have 2 full time people here. Another is arriving next week. We are
in a period of rapid expansion as we deploy the CEB press for
construction, providing infrastructure for collaborators.

Marcin