GENOMICON

In the future (and by that I mean 10-20 years) I think a lot of product design will be free and open sourced, and physical instantiations of these designs will be for sale… but basically anyone will be able to make their own if they want by taking them to their local print shop (which will have aquired 3d fab-lab units) and get the cut/made locally.

Rather than this being the creativity killer that copyright cartels claim it will be, it will lead to an explosion of creativity… a far greater number of people will be able to supplement their income by bridging various mechanical-aptidude gaps than are currently employed in the rarified ivory towers of corporate product design studios.

With that in mind, here’s a designer who makes open-source designs, and sells the products.

The payoff is of course that he gets talked about. I’m talking about him now. People who are involved in the creation of an object are far more likely to become evangelists for the product’s designer.

It’s 2008. The future sure is getting here slow… but it is getting here.

These hexapod robots remind me of a sci-fi short-story I read when I was a kid back in the 70s – the story itself being written in 1958 – Crabs on the Island by Anatoly Dneprov. Enjoy etc.

Someone’s discovered that if you attach a vibrator to a sawn-off toothbrush, it scurries about the place:

So they put it up on Youtube… and now there are about 150 other versions, all evolving and morphing etc.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. There are a bunch of remote controlled ones…

And for some reason, the better the bot, the worse the music.

They evolve legs, wheels, lights, become petrol driven, learn to paint

I think what’s important (or at least interesting) about this isn’t the fact that you can make toothbrushes scurry about the place, it’s that people are taking a daft little bit of technology and exploring hundreds of different angles that probably wouldn’t be considered if people were working in isolation. It’s like having a combination lock and being able to try out hundreds of combinations at the same time… it massively increases the possibility that something truly remarkable will be unlocked.

And maybe something has been at a higher level… people are doing this rather than watching television.

The crab-router might even be a better platform for rep-rapping than the original rep-rapper. It could do scary things like wandering about finding its own fuel etc. I was thinking that it will be a while before it can make its own servos etc… but then I remembered the machine that someone made out of lego a year or two ago for solving Rubik’s Cubes… 

…so I looked it up on youtube and now there’s a whole sub-culture of Rubik’s cube solving machines

Which kindof makes me think that maybe someting that can make servos might not be so impossible afterall – just because I can’t imagine it, doesn’t mean someone else can’t. Here for example is something I hadn’t considered:

Robots that are basically single-cell creatures forming mult-cell organisms on their own.

There’s a talk here by Kevin Kelly talking about the evolution of technology – and with specific interest here is when he talks about technological evolution never dieing – the resurgence of Stirling Engines is an example of what can happen here. The technology is about 120 years old, and now they’re appearing all over the place.

What we’re seeing here is a new type of evolution.

Normal natural selection involves replicators blindly mutating and the best combinations surving to replicate again. The combination of the internet and a release of cognitive surplus (and open-source licensing models) means that every single replication/mutation can conceivably take place with the entire knowledge of everything that’s been tried and worked so far.

It’s a type of evolution that doesn’t happen in the dark. It’s still competitive but there’s a kind of modular over-arching consciousness that’s governing and driving it.