User:CharlesC/About me

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'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...

What led me to creating this website

After thinking for a long time about the effect that ever increasingly sophisticated automation would have on our society, I came to the conclusion that we would be able to create an unprecendented abundance of material items which ultimately only depends on the availability of matter and energy. And fortunately, despite the constant doom and gloom in the press, 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 evironment. 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 entirely 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).

At the turn of the millenium while I was coming to this conclusion, I also discovered the free software / open source movement and it struck me fairly soon after that this method of collaboration seems well suited to designing physical artifacts and systems too. This then gives us the mechanism to design efficient goods, and the automated systems, described in the scenario above. 'Open design', as it might be called, also has the benefits of being a non-controlling, non-proprietary system and would hugely reduce the duplication of effort in design and engineering. It is inclusive to anyone who wants to be part of the process and doesn't have the conflict of interest of needing to benefit any shareholder, other than all of us, who ultimately are shareholders of this planet.

Because these concepts seem to have so much potential (especially when yoked together) in helping to overcome many of the problems that we face at the moment, I put this website together a) to help crystalise 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 other s to help evolve the ideas and discuss other things that become possible as a result.

(How might this become possible and what will people do?)

(If money is a concept based on scarcity, then what will become of it?)

Old

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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