I'll admit that I have long put off reading Neil's book, but on the
other hand, I've had enough contact with people who have read it, and
people that work with him daily, or something, to know what it's
about, and enough flipping through it while in the used book store to
also know that some of the discussions on the open manufacturing list
have already gone a little bit further than what he might have
explored in the book- if not, I'd be happy to go take a look at the
book of course, please cite and ref etc.
I do not think it's much of a problem of "labor values" or "economics"
here. The motivating statement for your email was supposedly your
opening quote: "... by helping everyone else acquire the technology
they need". How can we make this happen? By building the tools. How
can we make tools? Instead of being endlessly caught up in the
concerns of economics, the question of how can we make tools is a
rather technical issue- though not an impossible one.
An email on the topic of fabricational recursion
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/113d5a39898e061a?hide_quotes=no#msg_2000b6278e1af0ea
Dependencies, steps, reliability engineering, statistical models of
debian's ecology
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/9761b60732d5da4b
It will, however, require a shift away from thinking that current
businesses must- for some ideological or maybe some implicit or
axiomatic reason- or future businesses- support the closing of the
loop of technological dependencies and empowering individuals. There
is no (valid) sophistry here, no prose or politics, just the
undeniable truth of whether or not those fablabs *work*, whether they
are doing their job, or doing what they look they are doing- a topic
which Eric has poured many brain-hours into. For instance, do fablabs
actually shorten dependency paths when their hardware is mostly
proprietary-- what are we giving these "others" around the world in
these fablabs if they are unable to build their own tools, if they are
unable to 'replicate'?
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2fccdde02f402a5b
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/f456aebde5952d03?
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/cc2256bf7814a1e4
Although I will not deny it would be nice, perhaps amazingly nice, for
what Nathan calls the "pitfalls of the present industrial system" to
take some positive collaborative interest in assisting individuals in
strengthening the tool availability coefficients and amplificable tool
building abilities,* I am not sure that their involvement would be the
catalysis or the "secret ingredient" for what we're hoping to
accomplish, so their non-participation would hardly push things back
20 years.
((I suspect there /are/ no secret ingredients overall anyway, which is
why it's so important to be proactive in terms of building, designing
and programming, since there are, in fact, things that need to get
done.))
Come to think of it, putting estimates in terms of years until some
vaguely definable technological state - like the technological
singularity - reminds me of Paul's commentary on some of Kurzweil's
books-
And recently I got wind of this abstract in my inbox for a paper that
I was vaguely involved with:
"""
Title: Changing the frame of futurism: From story-telling to
heavy-tailed, high-dimensional probability distributions
Keywords: Bayesian, futurism, heuristics and biases, decision support,
black swans, heavy tails, dynamic Bayes nets, stochastic differential
equations, continuous-time Markov processes, structural uncertainty
Abstract: Most futurism (e.g., Kurzweil) offers a single predictive
scenario, or, at best, small collections of qualitative scenarios.
However, results from the biases and heuristics program of research in
cognitive psychology (in particular, results concerning the
conjunction fallacy, the availability heuristic, and expert
overconfidence) suggest that focusing on single, intuitively
plausible, story-like predictions about the future is likely to lead
to inaccurate predictions and failure to account for extreme, unusual,
or unprecedented events. These systematic errors in both the public’s
and policy-makers’ judgment are especially dangerous as technology
increases in power, making possible unexpectedly large effects and
unexpected new interactions, on scales up to and including human
extinction.
Recent advances in probabilistic methods and computational statistics
allow an alternative. We can now build software tools that allow
individuals to consider, not single storylines as to how the future
might go, but structured probability distributions over huge spaces of
alternative future trajectories. More specifically, we can break the
future state of the world into distinct aspects, each described by a
set of quantitative variables. We can then allow users to specify
conditional probability distributions which describe how each aspect
of the world (e.g. computing power) influences the time-evolution of
its own future state and of the states of other aspects of the world.
In this way, users are naturally led to see the interplay between
their causal intuitions and the joint probability distributions which
those intuitions necessitate, and acquire a realistic view of how much
fine-tuning is needed for the world to follow any single preconceived
storyline. Heavy tails arise from user uncertainties about the
strength of each interaction and from combined effects of many
uncertain background variables.
We present an early web application, The Uncertain Future, for
allowing users to model timelines until human-level AI. Our software
allows users to input probability distributions with a visual,
click-and-see interface, and it presents collated expert opinions on
each relevant sub-issue so that users can see the range of expert
beliefs as they enter their own probabilities. We also discuss
possible extensions.
"""
Anyway, perhaps that would be an avenue to explore for those who would
be uninterested in technical details and exploring topics on their
own? But on the other hand, it's really not the same thing as dawning
your sharpie and drawing some microchannels to fabricate polymers into
specific shapes, or something- playing with statistics and
uncertainties and feelings and beliefs, versus actually, you know,
pushing atoms and potentials around in a more direct manner.
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507
* I've just made that up, please forgive me
I'll admit that I have long put off reading Neil's book, but on the
other hand, I've had enough contact with people who have read it, and
people that work with him daily, or something, to know what it's
about, and enough flipping through it while in the used book store to
also know that some of the discussions on the open manufacturing list
have already gone a little bit further than what he might have
explored in the book- if not, I'd be happy to go take a look at the
book of course, please cite and ref etc.
I'll admit that I have long put off reading Neil's book, but on the
other hand, I've had enough contact with people who have read it, and
people that work with him daily, or something, to know what it's
about, and enough flipping through it while in the used book store to
also know that some of the discussions on the open manufacturing list
have already gone a little bit further than what he might have
explored in the book- if not, I'd be happy to go take a look at the
book of course, please cite and ref etc.
I do not think it's much of a problem of "labor values" or "economics"
here. The motivating statement for your email was supposedly your
opening quote: "... by helping everyone else acquire the technology
they need". How can we make this happen? By building the tools. How
can we make tools? Instead of being endlessly caught up in the
concerns of economics, the question of how can we make tools is a
rather technical issue- though not an impossible one.
An email on the topic of fabricational recursion
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/113d5a39898e061a?hide_quotes=no#msg_2000b6278e1af0ea
Dependencies, steps, reliability engineering, statistical models of
debian's ecology
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/9761b60732d5da4b
It will, however, require a shift away from thinking that current
businesses must- for some ideological or maybe some implicit or
axiomatic reason- or future businesses- support the closing of the
loop of technological dependencies and empowering individuals. There
is no (valid) sophistry here, no prose or politics, just the
undeniable truth of whether or not those fablabs *work*, whether they
are doing their job, or doing what they look they are doing- a topic
which Eric has poured many brain-hours into. For instance, do fablabs
actually shorten dependency paths when their hardware is mostly
proprietary-- what are we giving these "others" around the world in
these fablabs if they are unable to build their own tools, if they are
unable to 'replicate'?
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2fccdde02f402a5b
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/f456aebde5952d03?
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/cc2256bf7814a1e4
Although I will not deny it would be nice, perhaps amazingly nice, for
what Nathan calls the "pitfalls of the present industrial system" to
take some positive collaborative interest in assisting individuals in
strengthening the tool availability coefficients and amplificable tool
building abilities,* I am not sure that their involvement would be the
catalysis or the "secret ingredient" for what we're hoping to
accomplish, so their non-participation would hardly push things back
20 years.
((I suspect there /are/ no secret ingredients overall anyway, which is
why it's so important to be proactive in terms of building, designing
and programming, since there are, in fact, things that need to get
done.))
Come to think of it, putting estimates in terms of years until some
vaguely definable technological state - like the technological
singularity - reminds me of Paul's commentary on some of Kurzweil's
books-
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/
And recently I got wind of this abstract in my inbox for a paper that
I was vaguely involved with:
"""
Title: Changing the frame of futurism: From story-telling to
heavy-tailed, high-dimensional probability distributions
Keywords: Bayesian, futurism, heuristics and biases, decision support,
black swans, heavy tails, dynamic Bayes nets, stochastic differential
equations, continuous-time Markov processes, structural uncertainty
These systematic errors in both the public’s
and policy-makers’ judgment are especially dangerous as technology
increases in power, making possible unexpectedly large effects and
unexpected new interactions, on scales up to and including human
extinction.
We present an early web application, The Uncertain Future, for
allowing users to model timelines until human-level AI. Our software
allows users to input probability distributions with a visual,
click-and-see interface, and it presents collated expert opinions on
each relevant sub-issue so that users can see the range of expert
beliefs as they enter their own probabilities. We also discuss
possible extensions.
* I've just made that up, please forgive me