Difference between revisions of "User:CharlesC/About me"

Revision as of 23:38, 22 October 2006

I'm in my early thirties, live in England and currently work as a senior research engineer for Dyson Ltd. I have always been interested in the what becomes possible with new technology and new thinking. It is wonderful when new methods cull lots of complexity and enable things that were not previously possible. But I'm not a pure neophile, I have a huge appreciation for pre-digital era methods and would actually be quite happy living a simple(ish) rural life...

The train of thought that led me to this creating this website

I enjoy imagining the evolution of an idea until some sort of ultimate conclusion is reached or I run out of imagination and can't possibly think what might come next. I did this with various things like computer systems, automation, travel and education. These were mainly thought experiments, although I did attempt to make some of these ideas physical. It also became clear that in reality concepts don't evolve in isolation, things merge and affect each other, which only make them more interesting (if harder to understand how they might actually turn out).

At the turn of the millenium a bigger picture seemed to fall into place in my mind from joining up some of these ideas that seemed to me to enable society to create anything we wanted or needed with great ease and efficiency. There was always rather a lot to explain when talking to people about this optimised future I saw so the obvious thing was to create a website to lay it out and make it more digestible

The core enabling ideas:

Automation

I ended up musing on the comparison of some fictional highly automated economy to a biological ecosystem such as a jungle that provides a rich variety of goods with little attention.

The plants grow by taking material from the soil and the atmosphere and combining it with energy from the sun and a whole hierarchy of organisms feed off them. Simplistically, a highly automated economy does a similar thing - taking material from the ground and using energy from the sun (and other sources) to produce goods and power that people make use of. It is like a hi-tech jungle providing for us. As long as we have enough raw materials and energy people can have what they need.

An obvious question is what will ultimate automation enable and how will it change things. The economics becomes rather interesting I think. Of course people like doing things, making things, being creative and collaborating, so having a self-sustaining regional infrastructure humming away in the background could free people up to enable all this, and to have more time to be with the people we want to be with. It all sounds fairly idealistic I'll admit, but there are new methodologies brewing that make these ideas possible.

At a similar time I discovered free and open-source software, a fantastic philosophy and movement which soon struck me as being applicable to designing physical artifacts and systems too.

Other thoughts, education

Obviously plenty of other people have had ideas in a similar space, so link to them as well.

Other people similar conclusions etc.

This sounds like complete load of old bollocks, must organise what I'm trying to say here...

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