[hosh]

The author missed the true significance of the Maker Revolution. It is not about people being able to design their own products or having a market full of craptastic products.

The Maker Revolution is about being able to provide for your needs without depending on a global supply chain. It's about the kind of material freedom you might have if your neighborhood hardware store, or even your household fab in the garage can make all the goods for your basic needs, and then some.

[king_jester]

Is this really true though? To get raw materials to use a maker to build something you'll probably have to depend on global supply chains, esp. since most goods will require multiple kinds of material to complete.

> The Maker Revolution is about being able to provide for your needs without depending on a global supply chain.

> It's about the kind of material freedom you might have if your neighborhood hardware store, or even your household fab in the garage can make all the goods for your basic needs, and then some.

This is definitely the case, as most of what maker robots are creating now fit this category. With good enough tech, hardware stores, Wal-Mart, and other sellers of mass produced, low complexity items will go out of business, or at least be more much niche then they are now.

[hosh]

I think we're likely to have a long transitional period that still requires a large global supply chain ... but yes, it would be neat to see maker robots locally at say, Walmart or hardware stores.

[nickpinkston]

With all respect, I think your's is the "maker idealist" position on this movement. There are many reasons why economies of scale (which are due to physics / engineering problems) will continue to exist in manufacturing - even if many methods are democratized and available locally (a la TechShop today).

I've written on this recently: http://www.nickpinkston.com/2013/01/some-thoughts-on-digital...

[hosh]

Ok. I'm not expecting distributed manufacturing to come over night or even in the near term. I'm aware that it requires crossing over a threshold before that happens.

However, I think it is worth developing these technologies with that in mind. The landscape may change faster than we think.

So I don't think it is "idealist" in the sense that, "well, in the real world, this just isn't practical or possible."

[nickpinkston]

Yea, I think you're right on landscape changing fast. There are definitely bottlenecks that could be opened if the right discoveries were made in material science, etc.

[hosh]

Interesting. I'll take a look at that.

[mattmiller]

This is an interesting possible future. If all things are built from the same raw substance the supplier of that substance will be incredible wealthy and powerful. A new Carnegie in a global economy.

The next lower level of wealth will be the digital rights owners of commodity items. The rights owner of 'Shovel' will start a dynasty that will last for hundreds of years. They could potentially be powerful enough to extend copyright laws forever so that they continue to collect rent on the shovel.

[hosh]

Exactly. So what we are thrashing out with digital rights right now sets up for the kind of future when physical goods are more about the design licenses and rights to manufacture.

Thinking in those terms, we cannot actually discount the role that digital rights management plays. What makes DRM unfair and oppressive has a bit to do with who holds enforcement powers. If the seller also manages the DRM servers, then it holds all the power and can do whatever it wants. If the seller disappears, your access disappears.

One interesting around that is having a third-party rights management. Something like using Bitcoin contracts: http://codinginmysleep.com/exotic-transaction-types-with-bit...

In their example, you would have bitcoin signed three way: a seller, a buyer, and a mutually-agreed-upon arbitrator. Two sides of a party can complete the transaction. If both seller and buyer agrees, then the bitcoin's ownership transfers over. If there is a disagreement, they can talk to the arbitrator.

The article also talks about other examples, for example, using technology like Bitcoin to sign a loan agreement on a car with the car as a collateral. As long as the owner is making payments for the length of the loan, the car is accessible. When the payments are in arrears, the car is not repossessed; it is locked out remotely. It will be unlocked automatically by digital contract when payment resumes. It also means you can digitally sign over the contract to someone else -- effectively, selling to someone else the rights to use the car if they can get the payments back up and running again.

Something like that would work with digital goods. I can say, hold a contract specified in a Bitcoin-like token to a book. I have the right to loan it out the book to any number of people, but I can only loan it out once. If I loan it, I register via the same p2p mechanism that such a person has the right to read it. When I want it back, I can get the book back, or have the access rights automatically expire.

It doesn't keep pirates from it. If you can read the book, you have access to the raw data, and you can pirate it. Like any social agreements, it depends on that most people will abide by this. It's an iteration on the kind of strong property laws that allows entrepreneurialism to flourish in America.

I can have something similar in a world of powerful microfabs. I purchase manufacturing rights of a design, and it is registered publicly via a p2p mechanism that is not controlled by any private interest. If I purchased the right to manufacturing 100 units, I can split it off and sell or transfer 50 manufacturing rights to someone else. If I wanted to make derivative work, I'd get a separate derivative works license, also registered via a p2p contract system.

Further, I would essentially be paying the designer the perceived value of the good, while decoupling that with the material cost to manufacture such a good. I can choose to purchase additional raw material to feed into the microfab, or I can choose to recycle something I want to get rid of, break it down into its component parts, and make this new thing that I want.

And if I didn't want to pay the perceived value, I find or develop an Open Source version.

Your comments about "A new Carnegie in a global economy" -- that is the premise for Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. Personally, I think it is far more interesting not to control and be the sole supplier of the raw substance. Why do you want to control it? To be wealthy and powerful. Why do you want to be wealthy and powerful? That gets into some really interesting discussions.

[berntb]

>>provide for your needs without depending on a global supply chain.

Hmm... reminds me of a discussion (@Stross' blog) about how many people were needed in a society, to support a technological civilization. Stross argued we would need many millions of people.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insuffic...

(Of course, lots of specialised services can be replaced with less efficient generic ones, but even a minimum of one million people have severe implications for a Mars colony.)

Edit: Clarity

[yk]

The discussion focussed on the entire technological stack; and I do not think that anybody claims that we will be designing and printing comercial airliners from scratch at home. By contrast the maker revolution is (in its first stages) about the long tail of manufactoring. So in the forseeable future it is about beeing able to sell small runs of specialized goods at prices compareable to more generic and mass produced competition. While we still need several million people to produce the arduinos that power them.

[berntb]

The discussion noted all the specialities needed in education. The point I was trying to make is that a maker revolution has a potential to drastically cut down the number of specialized people needed; consider just e.g. logistics. (Not talking about the first stages.)

[yk]

Great point. This could be one of the non obvious social consequences of rapid manufacturing. At least if I think of the IT revolution, then in some sense system programmers replaced a lot different specialties, like delivery boys ( by email), accountants ( at least the half that was double checking the books fifty years ago) and type setters. And in a addition people with domain specific knowledge were enabled to use this knowledge efficiently with computers.

[hosh]

Basic material needs:

Food. Water. Shelter. Air.

Existential needs:

Love, affection, contentment, happiness, connection.

Technology can address the basic needs and can never address existential needs.

Everything else are wants. Wants are endless since they attempt to address existential needs but never actually satisfy them. In that sense, Stross is correct. There will always be more wants than can be supported by any given population size of society; but needs can be supported.

[bcoates]

If you're not young, able, and heterosexual, technology can easily be the difference between isolation and connection.

[berntb]

Uhh... you went of in some weird orthogonal direction. The Stross reference were about the minimum number of people needed for a technological civilization.

(Didn't you read it? Are you defending some belief system as an excuse for being religious? We're just talking past each others?)

(And you're wrong, anyway. without technology and science, we'd still have little time, get sick and die early -- living under tyranny. Not much chance of contentment and happiness when you e.g. see your kids die; it was ~ 30% child mortality before technology/science, depending on where you lived. The point is, industrialisation is a prereq for fulfilling existential needs for most of the population.)

[hosh]

Yeah. I read it. Given the constraint, premise, and assumptions, what Stross says makes sense. It's model that's limited in scope.

I'm not being religious. Satisfaction and contentedness is something you can go verify for yourself by observing yourself.

It is entirely possible for an individual to fulfill existential needs even with the horrors of 30% child mortality rate, but most people can't or don't do that. Technology serves as a great support for this, but it will never actually fulfill those existential needs.

It's my hope that microfab technologies will free up people's time so that they can really look into existential needs.

[derleth]

> Love, affection, contentment, happiness, connection.

Technology has addressed these more than you will ever realize.

As has been said already, technology greatly reduces isolation for anyone who isn't young, healthy, heterosexual, cissexual, and of the majority race in the region they find themselves. The ability to form connections based on mutual interests even when geography is against you is easily the difference between living and dying alone and finding a place where you actually fit.

What's more, the ability to make connections anonymously is essential. Being of the wrong persuasion, whatever that persuasion is, in the wrong environment can be grounds for anything from social ostracism to death. Without the technology to anonymously make connections with others, there are people who would risk death just looking for someone they'd enjoy spending time with.

The only people who think technology can't help with what you call 'existential needs' are the people who are lucky enough to not already know what I just posted. And they are amazingly lucky indeed.

[hosh]

Technology will get you only so far. Really connecting with someone is between you and that person, even if mediated by technology.

Companionship, social relations are not the same as love and affection, though they are related. Love isn't really about mutual interests, though mutual interests can mediate that. Mutual interests make it easier for people to understand and be empathetic with each other, but it is well within human possibility to be empathetic with one another without mutual interests.

I make a big deal of this because, while technology made it easier to connect with other people, I want to make clear that technology is not a replacement for connecting with other people.