AI & Robotically Assisted Public Resource Management
Nathan Cravens
Prompt:
Describe Nathan Wilson Cravens' 'holistic problem of manufacturing' and its solution, a 'public resource management' system.
Copilot:
Nathan Wilson Cravens’ concept of the ‘holistic problem of manufacturing’ refers to the challenges in creating a centralized point of access to the world’s diverse manufacturing capabilities. It encompasses various sectors from agriculture to high-tech industries and emphasizes the need for a comprehensive approach to managing these resources1.
The proposed solution, a ‘public resource management’ system, aims to aggregate information available on the web into taxonomies and viable design templates that can be translated into instructions for machines or people. This system would ideally facilitate the autonomous delivery of physical packets and streamline the manufacturing process across different industries1.
Cravens’ vision includes integrating principles of design justice and Elinor Ostrom’s rules for managing common-pool resources, which advocate for sustainability, community empowerment, and collective ownership1. The goal is to create a more equitable and efficient manufacturing ecosystem that aligns with the values of the peer-to-peer (P2P) foundation2.
Prompt:
What are some challenges in implementing a public resource management system?
Copilot:
Implementing a public resource management system comes with several challenges, including:
Financial Constraints: Sufficient funding is needed to acquire, update, and maintain the system1.
Expertise Shortage: There may be a lack of ICT and specialized knowledge among the workforce1.
Technical Difficulties: Developing a robust and scalable system that can handle diverse data and user needs is complex2.
Regulatory Hurdles: Navigating the legal and regulatory frameworks can be difficult3.
Data Quality: Ensuring the accuracy and quality of data within the system is a significant challenge4.
These challenges require careful planning, adequate resources, and a collaborative approach to overcome and ensure the successful deployment of a public resource management system2314.
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Holistic Problem of Manufacturing - P2P Foundation
Innovation is known to work well in small tight knit groups, so startups and small groups within large corporates or public agencies can work together to create universal hardware and software standards for a public resource system. With radical transparency or open source principles, assisted by AI, individuals can contribute to code or designs.
Developers will need to share a vision for how the public resource system will operate, combining a variety of currently siloed disciplines underlying applications in software; and materials, design, and assembly knowledge in hardware. Soft and hard interoperability is key. Transparent process and materials flows are crucial to streamlining complexity while enabling innovation.
To enable visions of public resource environment, let’s touch on a few recent developments and describe how they might be of use to public resource management:
Figure 01 - FigureAI - humanoid robot
Devin - Cognition Labs - software development partner
SORA - OpenAI - text-to-video generation
Highly suggested! Watch the latest (13 March 2024) Figure 01 demo if you haven’t already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq1QZB5baNw
Corey Lynch from FigureAI on X explained:
https://twitter.com/coreylynch/status/1767927194163331345
All behaviors are learned (not teleoperated) and run at normal speed (1.0x).
We feed images from the robot's cameras and transcribed text from speech captured by onboard microphones to a large multimodal model trained by OpenAI that understands both images and text.
The model processes the entire history of the conversation, including past images, to come up with language responses, which are spoken back to the human via text-to-speech. The same model is responsible for deciding which learned, closed-loop behavior to run on the robot to fulfill a given command, loading particular neural network weights onto the GPU and executing a policy.
The demo presents a few domestic tasks while stationed at a table, able to verbally reason a previous task while performing another. A demo I’d like to see is a few humanoid companions working in a makerspace, operating hand tools, fabricating clothing, then furniture, and electronics, and onto assembling robots. Wheeled autonomous robots with storage capacity can feed the humanoid network with materials. In a final dream demo, high rises and other urban buildings are occupied as free and open zones by a robotic ecology to transform into housing, indoor gardens, fabrication facilities, ect.
The humanoid, Figure 01, is currently a research project in a privately funded startup, but as the company and competitors align on standards that enable production at scale, this can benefit the open source hardware community and its goal of distributed fabrication. The open hardware community tends to focus on small distributed manufacturing, but if the organizational process is open source, large-scale endeavours can have a place in the ecosystem. The book, People’s Republic of Walmart, explores the possibility of beneficial large scale platforms.
Software may be eating the world, but now AI is eating software, like Devin from Cognition Labs, a digital software programmer that acts as a work group companion. Such agents will accelerate software and eventually all development. To paraphrase Jenseng Huang, CEO of Nvidia: soon everyone will be a programmer, as natural language will manipulate code. And if simple human language can manipulate code, so too with design–and remotely with robotics–the physical world.
https://twitter.com/cognition_labs/status/1767548763134964000 (includes video demo)
Today we're excited to introduce Devin, the first AI software engineer.
Devin is the new state-of-the-art on the SWE-Bench coding benchmark, has successfully passed practical engineering interviews from leading AI companies, and has even completed real jobs on Upwork.
Devin is an autonomous agent that solves engineering tasks through the use of its own shell, code editor, and web browser.
When evaluated on the SWE-Bench benchmark, which asks an AI to resolve GitHub issues found in real-world open-source projects, Devin correctly resolves 13.86% of the issues unassisted, far exceeding the previous state-of-the-art model performance of 1.96% unassisted and 4.80% assisted.
Open geospatial and materials information flows will provide a basis for web-observable, realistic 3D environments or digital twins. Text-to-video models like SORA can inspire changes to environments and objects in the real world.
Economic inequality and income and asset decline for most will continue. Eventually a breaking point will occur from some combination of environmental: climate and the excession of planetary boundaries, and economic: signalled by the cost of living and housing crisis. AI fueled automation is accelerating innovation, deskilling work, as shown by the labor-to-production decoupling that’s broadened since the 1970s.
Populations in the global north are declining, while life expectancy has increased until very recently. David Sinclair, a lifespan researcher, has boldly claimed curing ageing will come before curing all cancers. AI has created new materials, and may well enable the rejuvenation of biology. Either way, an elderly crisis is underway, pressuring market economies on at least two fronts: welfare payments and scarce care labor, creating demand for care robotics, hopefully with the dignity of a once affordable home. There are yet universal standards for humanoids, but companies like Tesla and FigureAI are currently working on them.
Superintelligent robots are coming. The challenge: transfering monopoly capital into the commons world of free and open source. How to do so without investors, profit, and wage labor remains a bewildering challenge. Let’s automate capital into oblivion, shall we?
High skill is not only rapidly being automated, but will become rapidly simplified with on-demand personalised AI generated tutorials within life-like virtual environments and object breakdowns. Generalized software and hardware will eventually automate everything, making work-for-money obsolete. Under the market system, more and more people are working harder for less as advancements are made and monopolies grow and merge. Even if we are presently dominated by five platforms filled with screenshots of the other four, AI/robotics developments offer a glimmer of clarity to what is possible.
If all wars are ultimately resource wars, a globally federated public resource platform, with proper checks and balances via environmental monitoring and sentiment analysis down to the individual, will reduce the likelihood of malicious scenarios.
To end on a thought experiment: when an AI can render and self-build a fully functioning, fully autonomous city or village: what will be the state of humanity?
What does our current oracle have to say on this matter?
Copilot:
In a thought experiment where AI and robotics reach a level of advancement that allows them to render and self-build a fully functioning, autonomous city or village, the state of humanity could be profoundly affected in several ways:
Ethical Considerations: Questions about governance, privacy, and the ethical use of AI in decision-making processes would become increasingly important3.
Technological Dependency: Reliance on technology for critical infrastructure could raise concerns about cybersecurity and the resilience of these systems3.
This scenario presents both opportunities and challenges, requiring careful consideration of the implications for social equity, economic stability, and the preservation of human agency132. It’s a rich area for exploration that touches on many aspects of human life and the future of our societies.
Copilot:
Nathan Wilson Cravens is an advocate for open manufacturing and peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. He has contributed to discussions on various topics such as the future of work, social transformation, and the role of technology in society. Cravens is known for his philosophy on the holistic problem of manufacturing and has proposed the idea of a public resource management system. He has also been involved with the Occupy movement as a librarian and has published several articles on political economy and systemic change1. His work reflects a deep interest in collaborative and sustainable approaches to production and governance.
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