Productive Recursion Proven
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Nathan Cravens
Mar 9, 2009, 12:18:08 AM3/9/09
to Open Manufacturing, ge...@cba.mit.edu, mars...@marshallbrain.com, Joseph Jackson, Abundance
"[F]ab labs are likely to have far greater impact on the stability of the planet by helping everyone else acquire the technology they need for thier survival."
Days ago I read Neil's very down to earth book, 'Fab'. Neil believes we'll have the equivalent of Star Trek replicators in twenty years time. I want this to happen, but there is one problem that us post-scarcity types are well aware, but perhaps have not put into these words: Incentives to produce while operating with less and less money (capital gain) over time is one obstacle that needs addressing as we go from the "minicomputer era of personal fabrication" to the personal computer era of fabrication. If the economic pitfalls of the present Industrial system are ignored, people will not have enough labor value to purchase the rights to print anything nor will firms have the incentive to invest in personal desktop fabricators to produce. If the capital gains issue is not addressed in our minicomputer era of fabrication, that issue alone may extend Neil's twenty year time frame unnecessarily.
Production methods lower the cost of products when simplified for rapid replication. That is called productive recursion. Understanding productive recursion is the first step to understanding how we need to restructure Industrial economic systems in response to this form of technological change. If Industrial systems are not reconfigured for productive recursion, they will collapse before reaching anywhere near full automation. I hope this writing helps divert a kink in the proliferation of personal desktop fabrication and full productive automation generally.
Here are cases that prove the theory of productive recursion in practice.
Distributed Production
Grass roots Indian TV cable operators charge roughly $2 per month for service, depending on the operator and number of clients. In short, this greatly reduced cost for service is due to reverse engineered satellite receivers by means of distributed production.
From Neil's 'Fab'
" A typical village cable system might have a hundred subscribers, who pay one hundred rupees (about two dollars) per month. Payment is prompt, because the "cable-wallahs" stop by each of their subscribers personally and rather persuasively make sure that they pay. Visiting one of these cable operators, I was intrigued by the technology that makes these systems possible and financially viable.
A handmade satellite antenna on his roof fed the village's cable network. Instead of a roomful of electronics, the head end of his cable network was just a shelf at the foot of his bed. A sensitive receiver there detects and interprets the weak signal from the satellite, then the signal is amplified and fed into the cable for distribution around the village. The heart of all this is the satellite receiver, which sells for a few hundred dollars in the United States. He reported that the cost of his was one thousand rupees, about twenty dollars"
The satellite receiver is made by an Indian company: Sharp.
" This Sharp turned out to be an entirely independent domestic brand. They produced all of their own products, although not in that room--done there, it would cost too much. The assembly work was farmed out to homes in the community, where the parts were put together. Sharp operated like a farm market or grain elevator, paying a market-based per-piece price on what was brought in. The job of the Sharp employees was to test the final products.
The heart of the business was in a back room, where an engineer was busy taking apart last-generation video products from developed markets. Just as the students in my fab class would learn from their predecessors' designs and use them as the starting point for their own, this engineer was getting a hands-on education in satellite reception from the handiwork of unknown engineers elsewhere. He would reverse engineer their designs to understand them, then redo the designs so that they could be made more simply and cheaply with locally available components and processes. And just as my students weren't guilty of plagiarism because of the value they added to the earlier projects, this engineer's inspiration by product designs that had long since become obsolete was not likely to be a concern to the original satellite-receiver manufacturers.
The engineer at the apex of the Sharp pyramid was good at his job, but also frustrated. Their business model started with existing product designs. The company saw a business opportunity to branch out from cable television to cable Internet access, but there weren't yet available obsolete cable modems using commodity parts that they could reverse-engineer. Because cable modems are so recent, they use highly integrated state-of-the-art components that can't be understood by external inspection, and that aren't amenable to assembly in a home. But there no technological reason that data networks couldn't be produced in just this way, providing rural India with Internet access along with Bollywood soap operas"
"There isn't even a single entity with which to partner on a join venture; the whole operation is fundamentally distributed"
Personal Fabrication
" For example, the ground resistance meters that were used for locating water in the era cost 25,000 rupees (about $500). At Vigyan Ashram they bought one, stripped it apart, and from studying it figured out how to make them for just 5,000 rupees. Those meters could then be operated to earn 1000,000 rupees per year in a business. Another example arose because they needed a tractor on the farm at Vigyan Ashram, but could not afford to buy a new one. Instead, they developed their own "MechBull" made out of spare jeep parts for 60,000 rupees ($1,200). This proved to be so popular that a Vigyan Ashram alum built a business making and selling these tractors."
Open Source Production?
" Anil runs the "Honeybee Network." Modeled on how honeybees work--collecting pollen without harming the flowers and connecting flowers by sharing the pollen--the Honeybee Network collects and helps develop ideas from grassroots inventors, sharing rather than taking their ideas. At last count they had a database of ten thousand inventions.
One Indian inventor couldn't afford or justify buying a large tractor for his small farm; it cost the equivalent of $2,500. But he could afford a motorcycle for about $800. So he came up with a $400 kit to convert a motorcycle into a three-wheeled tractor (removable of course, so that it's still useful as transportation). Another agricultural inventor was faced with a smilar problem in applying fertilizer; his solution was to modify a bicycle."
I hope these segments add to the vision and motivate your work.
On Productive Recursion
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Productive_Recursion
Nathan Cravens
Effortless Economy
Days ago I read Neil's very down to earth book, 'Fab'. Neil believes we'll have the equivalent of Star Trek replicators in twenty years time. I want this to happen, but there is one problem that us post-scarcity types are well aware, but perhaps have not put into these words: Incentives to produce while operating with less and less money (capital gain) over time is one obstacle that needs addressing as we go from the "minicomputer era of personal fabrication" to the personal computer era of fabrication. If the economic pitfalls of the present Industrial system are ignored, people will not have enough labor value to purchase the rights to print anything nor will firms have the incentive to invest in personal desktop fabricators to produce. If the capital gains issue is not addressed in our minicomputer era of fabrication, that issue alone may extend Neil's twenty year time frame unnecessarily.
Production methods lower the cost of products when simplified for rapid replication. That is called productive recursion. Understanding productive recursion is the first step to understanding how we need to restructure Industrial economic systems in response to this form of technological change. If Industrial systems are not reconfigured for productive recursion, they will collapse before reaching anywhere near full automation. I hope this writing helps divert a kink in the proliferation of personal desktop fabrication and full productive automation generally.
Here are cases that prove the theory of productive recursion in practice.
Distributed Production
Grass roots Indian TV cable operators charge roughly $2 per month for service, depending on the operator and number of clients. In short, this greatly reduced cost for service is due to reverse engineered satellite receivers by means of distributed production.
From Neil's 'Fab'
" A typical village cable system might have a hundred subscribers, who pay one hundred rupees (about two dollars) per month. Payment is prompt, because the "cable-wallahs" stop by each of their subscribers personally and rather persuasively make sure that they pay. Visiting one of these cable operators, I was intrigued by the technology that makes these systems possible and financially viable.
A handmade satellite antenna on his roof fed the village's cable network. Instead of a roomful of electronics, the head end of his cable network was just a shelf at the foot of his bed. A sensitive receiver there detects and interprets the weak signal from the satellite, then the signal is amplified and fed into the cable for distribution around the village. The heart of all this is the satellite receiver, which sells for a few hundred dollars in the United States. He reported that the cost of his was one thousand rupees, about twenty dollars"
The satellite receiver is made by an Indian company: Sharp.
" This Sharp turned out to be an entirely independent domestic brand. They produced all of their own products, although not in that room--done there, it would cost too much. The assembly work was farmed out to homes in the community, where the parts were put together. Sharp operated like a farm market or grain elevator, paying a market-based per-piece price on what was brought in. The job of the Sharp employees was to test the final products.
The heart of the business was in a back room, where an engineer was busy taking apart last-generation video products from developed markets. Just as the students in my fab class would learn from their predecessors' designs and use them as the starting point for their own, this engineer was getting a hands-on education in satellite reception from the handiwork of unknown engineers elsewhere. He would reverse engineer their designs to understand them, then redo the designs so that they could be made more simply and cheaply with locally available components and processes. And just as my students weren't guilty of plagiarism because of the value they added to the earlier projects, this engineer's inspiration by product designs that had long since become obsolete was not likely to be a concern to the original satellite-receiver manufacturers.
The engineer at the apex of the Sharp pyramid was good at his job, but also frustrated. Their business model started with existing product designs. The company saw a business opportunity to branch out from cable television to cable Internet access, but there weren't yet available obsolete cable modems using commodity parts that they could reverse-engineer. Because cable modems are so recent, they use highly integrated state-of-the-art components that can't be understood by external inspection, and that aren't amenable to assembly in a home. But there no technological reason that data networks couldn't be produced in just this way, providing rural India with Internet access along with Bollywood soap operas"
"There isn't even a single entity with which to partner on a join venture; the whole operation is fundamentally distributed"
Personal Fabrication
" For example, the ground resistance meters that were used for locating water in the era cost 25,000 rupees (about $500). At Vigyan Ashram they bought one, stripped it apart, and from studying it figured out how to make them for just 5,000 rupees. Those meters could then be operated to earn 1000,000 rupees per year in a business. Another example arose because they needed a tractor on the farm at Vigyan Ashram, but could not afford to buy a new one. Instead, they developed their own "MechBull" made out of spare jeep parts for 60,000 rupees ($1,200). This proved to be so popular that a Vigyan Ashram alum built a business making and selling these tractors."
Open Source Production?
" Anil runs the "Honeybee Network." Modeled on how honeybees work--collecting pollen without harming the flowers and connecting flowers by sharing the pollen--the Honeybee Network collects and helps develop ideas from grassroots inventors, sharing rather than taking their ideas. At last count they had a database of ten thousand inventions.
One Indian inventor couldn't afford or justify buying a large tractor for his small farm; it cost the equivalent of $2,500. But he could afford a motorcycle for about $800. So he came up with a $400 kit to convert a motorcycle into a three-wheeled tractor (removable of course, so that it's still useful as transportation). Another agricultural inventor was faced with a smilar problem in applying fertilizer; his solution was to modify a bicycle."
I hope these segments add to the vision and motivate your work.
On Productive Recursion
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Productive_Recursion
Nathan Cravens
Effortless Economy
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