DouglasReay/HumanSwarms3

Continued from [DouglasReay/HumanSwarms] and [DouglasReay/HumanSwarms2]

The full stack

I've talked so far about robots and 3D fabricators. Before I go on, I want to list the elements of the full stack, above and below.

Sunlight

Free energy, no patents or copyright required for use.

Air

Also free. Good source of Carbon Dioxide.

Algae

Take a clear plastic tank. Fill it with water and a few trace nutrients. Add algae, sunlight and blow air through it. Sit back and watch them grow. Simple. So simple, a robot could do it.

  * [Algaculture]
  * [Algal Production]
  * [Photobioreactors]

Algae produce glucose which can be used as a [growth medium] for E. coli bacteria.

E. Coli

There is a strain of E. coli that, when used to ferment glucose, produces PLA. ([source]). Just like Algae cultivation, this can be done in a tank.

PLA

[Polylactic Acid](PLA) is a biodegradable thermoplastic that can be used as [feedstock] for 3D fabricators. It can also be extruded into pipes or sheets. Which, by nice coincidence, are precisely what is needed to create tanks for Algae and E. coli and join those tanks together and to water and air supplies. You could even make them in pretty colours, and in sections, then snap them together like lego. Or better yet, have robots assemble them.

Bioplastic Extruder

A [Bioplastic Extruder] is the device needed in order to turn the raw sludge from the tanks into pipes, sheets and feedstock pellets ready for the fabricator to use. There's a design for one available from the [Open Source Ecology project]. Other machines from that project could be used to make stepper motors and extruder nozzels. What they can't make are integrated circuits.

Linux

The software needed to run a 3D fabricator will run under Linux.

OpenRISC?

Linux will run on the [OpenRISC] processor platform.

FPGA

OpenRISC? can be put on an [FPGA] board, such as this [development board] based on an [ALTEA FPGA chip].

Chip Batching

The economies of scale are bad for open source [chip fabrication], however there are companies that will take designs, make a mask, and print off batches of chip to the customer's design: [part1], [ part2], [ part3] and the price does go down the more people using the same design.

RecycleBot?

Or, instead of growing your own plastic, you could recycle plastic that others are no longer using:

  * [RecycleBot]
  * [Waste Plastic Extruder]

Open Knowledge

The [Public Knowledge Project]

More concepts

Ok, so that's the full stack. Just add land, power, water, time and human effort. Water may be collectible from rain or the sea, in some areas. Power might be generatable from tides, streams, solar powered steam turbines or even from the wind, using only components makable with a 3D fabricator. But other elements, such as land, are unlikely to be free in a scalable fashion, and it is pricing and making efficient use of them that I want to talk about next.

First, some more concepts...

Distributed Computing

[SETI@home] is the most famous example of this. Chop up a problem into bits, send it out, and let computers spread around the world work on each small part for you then send their answers back. There are other architectures that use a peer-2-peer model, with no central bottleneck. But the problem remains: why would someone else be kind enough to give you time on their CPU, and how can you trust them with your files or not to lie about the answers?

Cryptography, redundancy and sandboxes provide the answers to many of the questions about trust, but that leaves the motivation question.

 * [Tahoe LAFS]
 * [The Eternity Service]

Agoric Computing

An early attempt at solving the motivation question was Mojo Nation, which created an artificial micro-currency usable only for transactions within its application network. Everything one user could offer to another (relay services, file storage, computation, bandwidth) was charged for so, for example, a woman who wanted others to help publish her files might get 'mojo' to pay for that service by offering space on her computer's hard drive to store the files of others. This mechanism helps with the freeloader problem and makes a network resistant to spam-like attacks.

 * [mojo home], [mojo intro], [mojo basics] [mojo technical], [mojo faq]
 * [bitcoin smart contracts], [bitcoin smart property]

Packet-Switched Networks

In a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet-switched_network packet-switched network] all transmitted data, irrespective of content, type, or structure is grouped into suitably sized blocks, called packets. The network over which packets are transmitted is a shared network which routes each packet independently from all others and allocates transmission resources as needed.

The principal goals of packet switching are to optimize utilization of available link capacity, minimize response times and increase the robustness of communication. When traversing network adapters, switches and other network nodes, packets are buffered and queued, resulting in variable delay and throughput, depending on the traffic load in the network.

Asset Tracking

[RFID] tags are often used to track assets within a business' distribution network. Parcel delivery companies like [DHL] even provide web interfaces to their inventory management system so that customers can track in real time where their parcel is, because its location gets updated in the system every time it passes a node.

Agents

Auction services, such as eBay, offer a [Trading API] that lets computer programs (called "software agents") bid on items. [SMART Agents] are software agents that can act like swarms, splitting a problem into specialised pieces and paying other agents to go do part of a task for them.

Markets

Stock exchanges employ [market makers] to take on the risk of smoothing out matching up buy and sell orders. For some assets there is also a market for [futures contracts], which allows producers to alter their production in anticipation of future demand.

Pre-Caching

[Pre-caching] refers to software that downloads data ahead of time in anticipation of its use. For example, when a Web page is retrieved, the pages that users typically jump to when they leave that page might be precached in anticipation. When you apply the concept to a group of people, rather than a single users (such as an ISP who notices several people looking for a search term and pre-caches material in its other proxies in anticipation) it becomes increasingly accurate. [Google], twitter, and a number of other data-companies have reduced this to a fine art, even using it to predict new strains of flu.

Balloons

What else can you make with bioplastics? Balloons! Coloured baloons, designer shaped-balloons, radio controlled blimps.

  * [Micro-blimp]
  * [RC blimps]
  * [Micro RC blimp] - note the simple plastic parts, easy to fabricate

If you're using them in a large convention hall you could use wall mounted fan at different heights to set up artificial 'jet streams', which balloons could use to navigate with just by altering their height (which they could do by mechanically expanding or contracting a helium floatation sack).

The Big Ideas

By now you can probably see where I'm going with this...

Nodes - basics

Think of an individual conference venue as being a node on a network. Other nodes might be MakeSpaces?, storage companies or just the private homes of enthusiasts. Anyone can register themselves onto the network as a node, provided they have credit or services to offer, and they follow the network's protocol. Nodes would start off with 0 reputation (but can earn more, or purchase some by putting up a bond, or by being backed by others who do have reputation). Services a node might offer include: making stuff to a supplied design, making feedstock, storing stuff, recycling or disposing of stuff, designing stuff, transshipping stuff (receiving, and sending on). (A node that only designs stuff could be virtual and only have a net address. All other nodes require both a net address and a physical geo-location.)

The Dirigible Transport Network

Stuff might be sent on via computer-guided boat or dirigible, or the node owner could pay to have it couriered by bicycle, car, lorry, train, etc. But, if a network of effective free (if slow) transport can be set up between nodes, and the stuff itself is also very low cost (using the full stack), then price becomes a matter of storage, transport bandwidth and construction time, and things start getting interesting.

Because it then becomes possible to physical pre-cache. Book publishers do this to some extent, producing large print runs, sending them out on-spec to bookshops, and accepting back as 'returns' the ones that don't get sold. But it could be done in a distributed manner, with nodes producing 'on-spec' stuff they think is likely to be useful eventually (such as feed stock, lego bricks, or the components required to construct a new boot-strap node), selling them to an automated 'market maker' that takes a percentage of the price and uses it to pay for storage in the network, and decreases the price it will pay for a good as it builds up reserves or as its prediction of future demand goes down. Like bit-torrent or the eternity service, a high demand in one location will trigger movement of that good and increased duplication of how much of it is stored.

Nodes - raising

A man walks out into an empty field that he's just rented from a farmer for 5 years, carrying an iPhone. He carefully walks the boundary, gathering the GPS coordinates, then fills out a form registering a new node that he's named "Dan's Maker Heaven". He notifies his friends with his node's cryptographic key, who then sign the key, investing some of their reputation in it. He then picks a default bootstrap plan, sends off a SMART Agent (with some time and budget constraints) to get the ball rolling. A little while later the agent returns with three possible implemention suggestions. He picks one, authorises payment and publishes the resulting timetable. Nearby nodes who have agents watching for such announcements are notified and get in contact to establish transport route possibilities. The plan has already marked out on the virtual map of the node which part of the field is a temporary storage area and which is a landing field. The man hammers in a number of radio stakes to act as guiding beacons, a scanner near the field's road entrance for couriers to hold package deliveries up to, and a few surveillance cameras for security and organisation, then leaves.

From this point on he could do all the assembling himself, but he's a busy man and he opted for a different plan. Instead, once the agent notes a critical mass of parts that have been delivered or are one their way and due to arrive soon, it creates an entry in the public local calendars for a 'barn raising' event. People put in bids for which items they'll assemble for him and on the planned day he'll drive back to the field, greet people with home printed chocolate sculptures (or jelly babies - their preference), and generally watch while teams follow the instructions in the earpieces to lay out plastic sheeting, fill algae tanks and callibrate 3D printers.

Once a minimum bootstrap setup has been raised and tested, the node is open for business and, when not fulfilling service orders for others, it can use its spare capacity to build itself up into a full node enshrined in a 'crystal palace' of plastic barns designed to gather rain water, optimise sun use, generate power if needed and provide storage space for others to facilitate the network. It could, if he'd chosen, also include a living space for humans and even an ergnomic design studio and test-bed area, but that's not the design he picked. In line with the swarm philosophy, nodes don't have to be generalists - they can specialise and then trade with others who (through different specialisations) can provide needed things cheaper.

Nodes - breeding

One could measure the efficiency of a node design by its "time to self-duplicate" - how long it would take to produce all the needed components (including spare to sell for cash to bid for services used in construction) to make a new identical node. Another measure would be if it could produce goods at a sufficient rate to pay for the rent on the land (which would make renting land then building nodes a self-sustaining business model, in areas where planning permission or lawlessness isn't a problem). Or you could use, as a measure, how many humans a certain area of land could support sustainably at a certain level of luxury, using that node design. If people published the metrics for their nodes, combined with the plans they used to assemble and run them, not only could people constructing new nodes pick one that suited their purpose, they could pick several similar ones and 'breed' them, triggering evolution.

Indeed, were a self-sustaining node to be owned by a computer program via a front corporation, you can imagine it doing that on all its aspects, from the genes of its feedstock organisms, to the designs of its lego swarmnoids. For many purposes a node would have all the properties of a living organism: Homeostasis, Organization, Metabolism, Growth, Adaptation, Response, Reproduction

Feedback

Edited to Add, 1st December, 2012 : [Matternet] and [ARIA]

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