Fwd: "all people should have access to enabling technologies"
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Bryan Bishop
Mar 20, 2012, 12:41:17 PM3/20/12
to Reece Arnott, diybio, Open Manufacturing, Bryan Bishop
Date: Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 4:09 AM
Subject: [reprap-dev-policy] Discuss: "all people should have access to enabling technologies"
To: reprap-d...@lists.reprap.org, Dunlug <dun...@lists.ethernal.org>, dunedin-m...@googlegroups.com, pp...@googlegroups.com
Cc: HCI List <h...@waitaki.otago.ac.nz>
Background
========
I have been doing a PhD and have come to the point of writing up the Motivation section describing why I'm doing what I'm doing. At the same time I watched the video http://vimeo.com/36579366 by Brett Victor titled "Inventing on Principle" and it got me thinking (the got me thinking part starts around 34 minutes 30 seconds into it and I highly recommend you watch it).
This lead me to try and articulate what has been the "guiding principle" that has lead me to get involved with various groups with strong ideological identities: namely the Reprap project (reprep.org), Open Source Software in general via the local Linux Users Group, the local Makerspace, and the local Pirate Party political party. The following is the outcome of this, reformatted slightly for email, that I am sending to the email lists of these various groups to stimulate discussion.
Does this hold together do you think?
Motivation
=======
During the last decade I have gradually come to the realisation that a guiding principle for my life is “all people should have access to enabling technologies”. This makes the inherent moral and value judgement that enabling technologies are good for society and that more good is created when more people have access to them. It follows therefore that it is my obligation to use the resources at my disposal to pursue this goal and break down any barriers that may hinder ordinary people from accessing enabling technologies.
The phrase “enabling technologies” is used here to mean “the tools used to make tools” and is defined in this purposely vague way to describe a continuum. It is not supposed to be used to group technologies into those that are “enabling” and those that are “not enabling”. Rather it is used to focus attention on what is important when comparing technologies. It gives a useful guideline as to a way to rank two technologies as to which is more valuable to society based on the potential uses of its end-products rather than on what it can do in and of itself. There are limited resources that can applied to technologies, so effort should be put into making the more enabling technology available to society at large by lowering barriers such as cost, specialised knowledge, or skills, and, in the case of immature technologies, having resources invested in making these technologies better. This leads to a few conclusions as to where effort should be spent in hardware, software, and even in the realm of pure ideas.
In hardware it may be relatively easy to rank two products, for example furniture is less important on this scale than a common workshop tool such as a file. Similarly, and not surprisingly, a fully equipped workshop is more important than any of the individual tools that make up the workshop. In the same way, as additive manufacturing can make a superset of items that subtractive manufacturing can make, a 3D printer is potentially more valuable than a fully equipped workshop with standard subtractive tools. Hence my interest in a low cost 3D printer for the masses.
[If you don't know the difference between additive and subtractive manufacturing see below where I've pasted in another section of the introductory section of my PhD]
With software, the differentiations can be harder to make but the guiding principle leads to the conclusion that software developed using the philosophies of the Free/Libre/Open Source communities is more valuable than the equivalent proprietary version of the product. When ranking two essentially identical software applications, if one of the applications is available for no cost with a permissive license and one has a licence fee and a restrictive licence, the former is more valuable to society in general. Software that allows the user to see the source code is more valuable than software that does not. Software that gives the user the ability to use the source code in a different context is more valuable than if it did not.
In the realm of pure ideas, whose only instantiation is the recorded word, there is normally no way to make a forecast as to how one idea will influence another, so access to more ideas is a social good and barriers restricting access to these ideas should be minimised. Therefore publishing in open access journals is better than in those that require a fee to read and legislation that puts more works into the public domain is better than legislation which increases the reach or length of copyright. This has lead to my involvement with the political process in a small way by becoming a member of the Pirate Party of New Zealand to help instigate legislative change. As one of the founding members of the party said, when summarising the Pirate Party position in a private conversation, “Access to information should not be dependent on the size of your wallet”.
This also changes the oft-maligned mantra “information wants to be free”, which could be considered to have connotations of inevitability and induce a passive longing for the future. A more active wording would be “information should be free” which is inherently a moral judgement and a call to action i.e. society would be better off if this were the case but it will require work to get there. Because of the moral judgements that come from this guiding principle, this document is hereby released into the public domain and the source code created in this project is released under a GPL license. For original source code the GNU General Public Licence version 3 (GPLv3) is used, with any modifications also required to be released under the same licence or, at the modifiers discretion, any later version. Where the software is a modification of a pre-existing piece of software which was licensed under a previous version of the GPL, the modified source may have been released under the same licence if the original authors did not provide for modifications to be licences under later versions.
As the Reprap project is an open source hardware and software project to create a low-cost 3D printer it is a project that is already well along this continuum and deserving of my time and skills to participate in it. My skill-set is not necessarily one that can best be used in helping the project directly so I rather looked at the potential barriers that would stop people making the best use of a Reprap 3D printer and I found what I consider to be a hurdle: the use of a 3D printer is limited to printing out those things that you have a 3D computer model of and creating these models is hard, especially if you want to duplicate a real world object.
Extra Additive vs. Subtractive Manufacturing details
================================
Manufacturing techniques of physical objects can be divided into two categories: additive and subtractive. As their names imply, additive techniques create value by starting with nothing and carefully adding to it whereas subtractive starts with a resource and adds value by removing parts from it. The primary manufacturing technique throughout history has been subtractive and the tools available in the standard home workshop reflect this from a simple file, to a lathe, to a CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) Router. Additive techniques have been fairly primitive until relatively recently and were normally simply the joining of multiple parts that were themselves made with subtractive techniques.
In general, an object that is considered to be complex to manufacture today is deemed to be so because it is required to be made from multiple parts that need to fit together in a precise manner, such as a gearbox, or because more material has to be stripped away compared to a less complex version, such as an ornately carved piece of furniture. With mature additive manufacturing techniques this is not necessarily the case. This can be summed up in the pithy statement, seemingly attributable to Scott Summit (e.g. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10464828-52.html), that with additive manufacturing “complexity is free”. In fact, in a lot of cases, for example that of purely aesthetic features such as ornate patterns on the surface of an object, the cost of this additional complexity may even be negative as less raw material is used and the piece will be completed faster compared to the less ornate version.
--
-------------------------
Reece Arnott
University of Otago
Dunedin
New Zealand
-------------------------
_______________________________________________
reprap-dev-policy mailing list
reprap-dev-policy@lists.reprap.org
http://lists.reprap.org/mailman/listinfo/reprap-dev-policy
Subject: [reprap-dev-policy] Discuss: "all people should have access to enabling technologies"
To: reprap-d...@lists.reprap.org, Dunlug <dun...@lists.ethernal.org>, dunedin-m...@googlegroups.com, pp...@googlegroups.com
Cc: HCI List <h...@waitaki.otago.ac.nz>
Background
========
I have been doing a PhD and have come to the point of writing up the Motivation section describing why I'm doing what I'm doing. At the same time I watched the video http://vimeo.com/36579366 by Brett Victor titled "Inventing on Principle" and it got me thinking (the got me thinking part starts around 34 minutes 30 seconds into it and I highly recommend you watch it).
This lead me to try and articulate what has been the "guiding principle" that has lead me to get involved with various groups with strong ideological identities: namely the Reprap project (reprep.org), Open Source Software in general via the local Linux Users Group, the local Makerspace, and the local Pirate Party political party. The following is the outcome of this, reformatted slightly for email, that I am sending to the email lists of these various groups to stimulate discussion.
Does this hold together do you think?
Motivation
=======
During the last decade I have gradually come to the realisation that a guiding principle for my life is “all people should have access to enabling technologies”. This makes the inherent moral and value judgement that enabling technologies are good for society and that more good is created when more people have access to them. It follows therefore that it is my obligation to use the resources at my disposal to pursue this goal and break down any barriers that may hinder ordinary people from accessing enabling technologies.
The phrase “enabling technologies” is used here to mean “the tools used to make tools” and is defined in this purposely vague way to describe a continuum. It is not supposed to be used to group technologies into those that are “enabling” and those that are “not enabling”. Rather it is used to focus attention on what is important when comparing technologies. It gives a useful guideline as to a way to rank two technologies as to which is more valuable to society based on the potential uses of its end-products rather than on what it can do in and of itself. There are limited resources that can applied to technologies, so effort should be put into making the more enabling technology available to society at large by lowering barriers such as cost, specialised knowledge, or skills, and, in the case of immature technologies, having resources invested in making these technologies better. This leads to a few conclusions as to where effort should be spent in hardware, software, and even in the realm of pure ideas.
In hardware it may be relatively easy to rank two products, for example furniture is less important on this scale than a common workshop tool such as a file. Similarly, and not surprisingly, a fully equipped workshop is more important than any of the individual tools that make up the workshop. In the same way, as additive manufacturing can make a superset of items that subtractive manufacturing can make, a 3D printer is potentially more valuable than a fully equipped workshop with standard subtractive tools. Hence my interest in a low cost 3D printer for the masses.
[If you don't know the difference between additive and subtractive manufacturing see below where I've pasted in another section of the introductory section of my PhD]
With software, the differentiations can be harder to make but the guiding principle leads to the conclusion that software developed using the philosophies of the Free/Libre/Open Source communities is more valuable than the equivalent proprietary version of the product. When ranking two essentially identical software applications, if one of the applications is available for no cost with a permissive license and one has a licence fee and a restrictive licence, the former is more valuable to society in general. Software that allows the user to see the source code is more valuable than software that does not. Software that gives the user the ability to use the source code in a different context is more valuable than if it did not.
In the realm of pure ideas, whose only instantiation is the recorded word, there is normally no way to make a forecast as to how one idea will influence another, so access to more ideas is a social good and barriers restricting access to these ideas should be minimised. Therefore publishing in open access journals is better than in those that require a fee to read and legislation that puts more works into the public domain is better than legislation which increases the reach or length of copyright. This has lead to my involvement with the political process in a small way by becoming a member of the Pirate Party of New Zealand to help instigate legislative change. As one of the founding members of the party said, when summarising the Pirate Party position in a private conversation, “Access to information should not be dependent on the size of your wallet”.
This also changes the oft-maligned mantra “information wants to be free”, which could be considered to have connotations of inevitability and induce a passive longing for the future. A more active wording would be “information should be free” which is inherently a moral judgement and a call to action i.e. society would be better off if this were the case but it will require work to get there. Because of the moral judgements that come from this guiding principle, this document is hereby released into the public domain and the source code created in this project is released under a GPL license. For original source code the GNU General Public Licence version 3 (GPLv3) is used, with any modifications also required to be released under the same licence or, at the modifiers discretion, any later version. Where the software is a modification of a pre-existing piece of software which was licensed under a previous version of the GPL, the modified source may have been released under the same licence if the original authors did not provide for modifications to be licences under later versions.
As the Reprap project is an open source hardware and software project to create a low-cost 3D printer it is a project that is already well along this continuum and deserving of my time and skills to participate in it. My skill-set is not necessarily one that can best be used in helping the project directly so I rather looked at the potential barriers that would stop people making the best use of a Reprap 3D printer and I found what I consider to be a hurdle: the use of a 3D printer is limited to printing out those things that you have a 3D computer model of and creating these models is hard, especially if you want to duplicate a real world object.
Extra Additive vs. Subtractive Manufacturing details
================================
Manufacturing techniques of physical objects can be divided into two categories: additive and subtractive. As their names imply, additive techniques create value by starting with nothing and carefully adding to it whereas subtractive starts with a resource and adds value by removing parts from it. The primary manufacturing technique throughout history has been subtractive and the tools available in the standard home workshop reflect this from a simple file, to a lathe, to a CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) Router. Additive techniques have been fairly primitive until relatively recently and were normally simply the joining of multiple parts that were themselves made with subtractive techniques.
In general, an object that is considered to be complex to manufacture today is deemed to be so because it is required to be made from multiple parts that need to fit together in a precise manner, such as a gearbox, or because more material has to be stripped away compared to a less complex version, such as an ornately carved piece of furniture. With mature additive manufacturing techniques this is not necessarily the case. This can be summed up in the pithy statement, seemingly attributable to Scott Summit (e.g. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10464828-52.html), that with additive manufacturing “complexity is free”. In fact, in a lot of cases, for example that of purely aesthetic features such as ornate patterns on the surface of an object, the cost of this additional complexity may even be negative as less raw material is used and the piece will be completed faster compared to the less ornate version.
--
-------------------------
Reece Arnott
University of Otago
Dunedin
New Zealand
-------------------------
_______________________________________________
reprap-dev-policy mailing list
reprap-dev-policy@lists.reprap.org
http://lists.reprap.org/mailman/listinfo/reprap-dev-policy
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507
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