[p2p-research] Workshop on Media Ecologies: Q&A: Sam Rose

[Samuel Rose]

Hey Nathan,

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Nathan Cravens<knuggy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > The goal is to do anything remotely!
>> >
>>
>> Our goal here is to first help people address the basic needs for
>> energy, food, shelter, and general physiological and psychological
>> survival using open source software and technology. Retorifitting
>> existing urban infrastructure, putting vacant land and buildings to
>> use, localizing food production, that sort of thing. I frankly way too
>> busy with that work to rise the challenge of the remote paper folding
>> robot.
>
> Yes, I'm with you there Sam, but an elderly population like Japan in the
> coming decades, assuming workers are not imported, these things must be done
> remotely, then automated.
> Folding paper is just one example...
>
> Perhaps people in the hackerspace or fab lab community would present
> something like this since they have the ability to pool more resources.
>
> I'm rather disappointed that no one thus far finds such a demonstration all
> that important. We need robotics to do tasks people would rather not do to
> keep essential functions so it is practical to apply peer production
> universally, where it is possible to manage all affairs asynchronously.
>
>


Sorry to disappoint. For me it is just a matter of priorities. I am
very committed to food and energy production, localized food
processing, and fabrication that helps those areas Plus some people
actually would rather do repetitive tasks. Ask anyone who has a hobby
like knitting, loom weaving, people who spend spare time proofreading
texts for free, staring picture on a website identifying craters on
Mars for free, etc etc. Crazy as it may seem to you and me, these
people do want to do this, that go out of their way to choose to do
these repetitive activities.

I think it would take a fairly large collaboration of people with
various expertise to actually create a working demo of all of the
things that you outlined. There are truly many thousands of hours of
work in the totality of what you outline, and I can't see too many
individual people volunteering to take on the task of putting all of
that together for free.

If I were going to try and do something practical with what you are
doing, I might try to do it this way:

Take existing remote-surgery style robotics, and use them to fold the
paper. Record the sequence of movements of the remote surgery-style
robot, and then run the sequence back to produce the folded paper
object thereafter

This takes the "3D environment" out of the equation, but still gives
you a way to automate a complex task like paper folding. You don't
even need parametrics, etc, if you have a way to record the sequence
of commands sent to the remote surgery-style robot. You could do the
first folding in person, then send the data to people to allow remote
robots to do it. If there really is value in a folding robot, it's my
opinion that this would be a way to deliver the technology.






-- 
-- 
Sam Rose
Social Synergy
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"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human
ambition." - Carl Sagan