User:CharlesC
I live in England and currently work as a senior research engineer for Dyson Ltd. I have always been interested in 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. I would describe myself as a generalist with a fairly broad interest and knowledge of technology and engineering, which helps me to glimpse this emerging bigger picture.
This website is still in its early stages, I am trying to create a skeleton for all the top level concepts involved and I'm slowly fleshing them out. So there may well be pages where things may not make much sense through lack of detail. Please bear with me!
What led me to these ideas
After thinking for a long time about the effect that ever advancing sophisticated automation would have on our society, I came to the seemingly logical conclusion that we should be able to create an unprecedented abundance of material items. Self-repairing and self-assembling automated systems could lead to closed-loop automation of all industrial (and transport) infrastructure; from mines and material processing plants to factories and power stations. Ultimately our ability to create things only depends on the availability of matter and energy. And fortunately, despite what one might intuitively think, the Earth has vast amounts of both.
This, combined with increasing energy efficiency and material recycling, means we should be able to provide very high standards of living for every person on the planet while minimising our impact on the environment. Sounds too good to be true doesn't it?
Based on human nature, I believe that if people are exposed to potentially vast abundance then materialism will become irrelevant and we should enter an era of unmaterialistic post-scarcity. Quality will then reign over quantity. Labour isn't an issue because this is the result of advanced automation - if we need greater capacity, we build more machinery to do the job. We use machines to do things machines are good at and we free people up to do things people are good at (and enjoy doing). For some, as an example, this might involve returning to a simpler way of life such as running a smallholding but with the benefits of the availability of advanced facilities (e.g. medical) if needed. People could choose what sort of life to lead and be free to experiment with different types of community and society. A post-era era in a sense.
At the turn of the millennium while I was coming to this conclusion, I also discovered the free and open source software movement and it struck me fairly soon after that this method of collaboration seems well suited to designing physical artefacts and systems too. Because of the visual nature of design and engineering it might be argued that it is even better suited to this approach than the more abstract and obscure art of code generation. This then gives us the mechanism to design highly efficient machines and goods, including the advanced automated systems, described previously. 'Open collaborative design' (or perhaps 'Open design and engineering') also has the benefits of being a non-controlling, non-proprietary system and encourages people to join in. It is inclusive to anyone who wants to be part of the process and doesn't have the conflict of interest that many companies face of trying to produce competitive goods while at the same time trying to maximise profits. It also means there is greater transparency to the process.
Because these concepts seem to have so much potential in helping to overcome many of the problems that humanity faces at the moment, I put this website together a) to help crystallise my thoughts and b) to give it wider exposure to anyone who might be interested. And because it is a wiki it gives the potential for others to help evolve the ideas and discuss other things that become possible as a result.
I feel the two major concepts of open design and self-repairing automation are likely to be two key components in the next phase of our civilisation, so this website is dedicated to those two subjects and the possibilities they subsequently enable, as well as other aspects crucial to our survival and progression.
