Recently, there have been some discussion of “derivative works” questions on the Thingiverse Google group. Specifically, makers have been wondering if they might get into trouble for uploading designs that were based on real-world objects or logos. This is an interesting question, and just as when Xerox copying machines first made “copying” something that could be done quickly and cheaply, the answer is complicated, and will probably get more so, as companies move to strengthen the laws that exist, or introduce new forms of protection. So, brave makers, the best we can do is know how things stand.
» Continue reading “Toe Stepping: Thingiverse and IP law”

For some time now I’ve been using Seth Godin’s blog as a window into the thinking of business types.  Here he talks of “avalanche opportunities,” those moments when effort put into a system can have huge paybacks.  Avalanche opportunites are what happens when something big is almost here.

Avalanche opportunites were everywhere during the 70’s and 80’s.  The release of the Apple II, that was an avalanche.  Once the public started to realize that computers weren’t room-filling machines that cost as much as a house anymore, the whole face of the market changed, dramatically, and really really rapidly.  And soon after that, personal computers were everywhere.  Before that, virtually nowhere, although hobby-like boxes like the Altair 8800 did exist.

The nostalgia tales of the Apple II have a really familiar ring to me.  A machine you had to know from the ground up to really use well, which was really less capable than the huge commercial machines but still capable of amazing feats the suits hadn’t figured out were enough to change the landscape, a hardcore group of dedicated hackers and nerds who got a visceral thrill from making discoveries that made everyone’s machine more useful just from some copied code– this is what the Apple II was like.

It’s also what the latest crop of 3D printers is like.

I’ve seen first hand and heard from others that 3D printing is at a point where it can do amazing things, but most people don’t know they can do amazing things.  As usability creeps up, with upgrades to slicing software and on-printer firmware, 3D printers will start to look more like plug-and-play fabricators.  And if I’m right, the next decade or so could be all about inexpensive personal fabrication, every bit as much as the ninties were all about inexpensive computers.

I love the coverage Fabbaloo did of the new MakerBot pulleys for bucks program.

If you’ve got a 3D printer, you can print 608 pulleys for the MakerBot, and MakerBot Industries will buy them from you for a buck each, with a minimum batch size of 30 for obvious reasons of scale.  In time, MakerBot wants to move more of their manufacturing off their factory floor and into the cloud.  Future versions of the MakerBot will have first their pulleys, and eventually a hefty fraction of their parts made by other users.

Dr. Bowyer’s original dream of putting a factory in every home might come true this way: in the long term, MakerBot Industries can leverage its own product’s ability to make mechanical parts to multiply their production capacity without making capital investment.  They’ll have created a system which meets large demand without building up excessive inventory.

This is the beginning of a new system of manufacturing, possibly every bit as important as the Industrial Revolution.  As time goes on, it won’t just be MakerBots that are made by distributed manufacturing, it’ll be many things.  That basket of goods I talked about being associated with consumer products just might start to include parts for the actual consumer products in a few years, if the technology continues to improve.

Speaking of the Industrial Revolution, it was centralized production that created economic cycles in the first place, with their large, high-momentum and open-loop production systems.  By comparison, distributed manufacture does not build up inventory nor does it require a company to make large capital investments.  I’m not saying a world with distributed manufacture will have no recessions, but they might get a bit softer in such an environment.

Bre shows us some really excellent robot skulls (note actuation systems are still so bulky they take up all the space where brain power would go on an organic system!) with servos in them and I immediately thought, “now at those scales, you could do the fiddly bits largely on a MakerBot.”

Sure you’d need springs, and probably would do better buying the eyes separately, but with standard servos and the magic of super-custom-tooling provided by 3D printing, I’m pretty sure animatronic machines are easily a possibility of personal 3D printing.  3D printing has another advantage though.  3D printing has the advantage that anything 3D printed has already been input into a CAD tool.

This is really neat in that you can show off your model and even run simulations on it to see it working (Blender’s physics engine is notoriously confusing, but it can be done), but in the specific application of animatronic puppets, there’s another big bonus.

Blender has tons of animation features.

With the right constraints, Blender can do inverse kinematics, combine animations, aid in lip-synch operations and a whole lot of other things.  Blender’s Python API provides an interface that should be able to get anything in Blender out and into the rest of the world.  Properly organized, an animation could be exported to a file, which could then be used to drive any number of servos in the real world.

What would you have then?  Why, you’d have your own little Rock-afire Explosion.

It’d take some pretty impressive software hacking and hardware wrangling to get all the peices made, but I think this one is going to happen, because nearly all of the peices that have to get put together are ones which can do something on their own, without the finished product.  Animatronic skull designs are useful without Blender providing walking instructions.  Blender-to-arduino interfaces are useful without animatronic skulls.  And you don’t need to be working on singing robots to want pre-constrained models for testing designs with servos.

Any one of these things, even without the whole, would also be really seriously cool.

As I’d hoped, my post on Post-Monetary Economics stirred up some significant discussion on the subject of living without money, and the subject of creating a world that doesn’t need money quite so badly.  In particular, the idea of getting the money out of what will for a while be stubborn hold-outs against de-monitization.  However, in the first follow-up post, I want to talk about what is already happening: the gradual transition of many activities from monetized to non-monetized markets, and the impact this will have on a world increasingly driven by two economies: one with money, and one without it.

First, a few words on my idea of “fundamental economics”.  This, I’ve found, is a surprisingly controversial topic.  Although the details vary widely, it usually comes down to: some believe that value is created by exchange, while others believe it is created by labor.  Both ideas have legitimate objections: both can be twisted to imagine scenarios where the definition would claim value was created, where clearly it was not.  (Exchange can happen which is circular, and work can produce useless things.)  I tend to operate on a definition which is a sort of smear between these two ideas, which is to say that value is created by labor which adds to the exchangeable value of the medium.  That’s a load of pretty horrendous jargon for someone who got a C-minus in AP Economics, but I also got a 4 on the test, so I’ll summarize: I think that the fundamental unit of economics is value, not currency, and that value comes from useful work.

With open source hardware and software, design work begins to become non-monetary.  Designers create value, do not draw salaries, and do not pay money when they benefit from other designs.  This has already, I would argue, deflated the apparent amount of economic activity in the US.  The open source software generated by developers in the United States does not show up on GDP.  It doesn’t show up on any economic indicater we have, BUT it enriches us all, and the world.  There are people in the open source community working their butts off for “nothing”.

It’s as though there was some mysterious corporation that spit out multimillion-dollar design efforts on a regular basis, without paying its employees or charging money for its software.  This conglomerate doesn’t pay any taxes, either.  It’s off the radar.

But it matters.

It matters because the people who work on open source projects are taking time off from their jobs to do it.  They’re working fewer hours to do it.  They’re taking less-taxing jobs to do it.  And if the open source phenomenon gets to be big enough, it’ll start making the figures show a nation slowly turning into a bunch of bums.  And while they’re doing it, they’ll be pumping tremendous amounts of value into the economy.

Countries that do not revise their economic policy and accounting practices in the face of this shift will misread an increasingly important economic movement as waste.  Countries that work to encourage this trend will enrich themselves.  This is no longer a hypothetical discussion on some Star Trek Moneyless Future.  This is current policy.  I think if the governments of the world want to have rational economic policy in this century, they will have no choice but to begin conducting surveys of open source technology and creators, constructing metrics to measure the created value, and providing grants that will encourage greater open source development.

The nature of economics is changing, and policy makers need to be watching.

The title of this post is not, actually, a contradiction in terms.

What it is, I think, is a discipline which will ultimately define the latter half of this century.  The open source community has, for decades now, been fueled by non-monetary value.  The Linux operating system has a lot of value in it, for example.  Blender, the open-source 3D modeling and animation program, has a lot of value in it.  But no money.

Behavioral economics is the discipline of figuring out why actors in economic problems behave “irrationally” with regards to raw economic benefit.  Increasingly, of course, what it really does is reveal sources of non-monetary value in people’s rational choices.  As it turns out, we do behave rationally in many cases, but with respect to things we value which are not worth any money.  (There are plenty of actual “economic illusions” which cause people to make predictably irrational decisions, but even ignoring these, behavioral economics would still be necessary.)

This month in Wired is an article about “the new socialism”, defined as the bottom-up networked fashion in which services are created, seemingly from nothing, by groups of collaborators who do not exchange money for their work.  If one were to consider the work put into a typical open-source project and then compute what it would have cost to pay the designers to create what they did for free, I think it would become rapidly clear that open source is creating huge amounts of wealth, without money, every year, already.

The RepRap tagline, wealth without money, is already true.  It’s already happening.  And as digital fabrication lowers the barriers to product creation, the wealth without money already being created in the software world will begin pouring into the hardware world.  At that point, governments will no longer be able to ignore the value creation of open source, because it won’t be something that “just happens on computers” anymore.  The smart governments will alter their economic metrics to measure and encourage this wealth creation, although surely some governments will mislabel it as a scourge, interpreting falling monetary activity as a drooping economy.

But post-monetary economic theorists will, I hope, be working out ways of showing off the value-creating engine of open source, ultimately making mathematical compromises that show economies which now grow by calibrated work-hours instead of dollars, revealing new ways of getting the biggest economic impact out of a community of workers.  Ways which, in the end, might have surprisingly little to do with monetary incentive.  I think there’d still be money.  But what it means, and how it is used, are very likely in my view to change dramatically in the next few decades.

And I think for governments that are responsive and wise, that change will be for the better.

(Photo by Zota)

It pleases me greatly to see how en vogue the expression “From the bottom up” has become lately.

It’s everywhere.  In political movements with the excitement in grass roots organization.  In the arts with participatory forms and guerrilla artwork.  In engineering, with both the Maker movement and soon with personal fabrication spreading to the living room.  One by one, disciplines of human endeavor are being democratized, jerked summarily from the clenched fists of hierarchy and heaved, sometimes with great fanfare and other times as one might chuck a boat anchor, into the sea of crowdsourcing and participatory work.

There are, of course, Royalists everywhere.  Their arguments are rational and they have lots of supporters, particularly among those who worry about the problem of quality vs. quantity.  If one surveys the landscape of any arena experiencing a democratizing influence, the Royalists make the same essential argument:

We are being flooded with terrible ideas, poorly conceived and poorly made, and no one will stop to listen for opinions worth hearing, or look for ideas worth having.  What we have to gain is only more ideas, not better ones.  What we are losing is institutions which stem this tide of bad ideas.

The Royalists argue that democratizing a field removes the disincentives for bad ideas while not doing anything to benefit good ones.  My counterargument to this comes in two parts.  First, I argue that selecting good ideas is problematic, and second, that the problem of having too many ideas, both good and bad, is manageable.

Good ideas are hard to spot at a distance.  There are lots of classic examples, from the discovery of vaccination (would YOU have been the first to intentionally infect people with a disease?) to that great photo of the original Microsoft team with the heading “Would you have invested?”  Bad ideas are everywhere, and even a cursory glance at modern network television will prove decisively that having an institution to narrow down the chosen ideas does not necessarily eliminate the bad ones.  Choosing ideas is difficult.  I would argue that we have little to gain from having fewer people deciding which is which.

And I do not believe the argument that we will lose good ideas in the coming sea of both good and bad ideas.  We will all need to become fishers for ideas, it is true, but one of the all-time great ideas of our age has been the very idea of advanced search capabilities, and thankfully this one has managed alright.  In the end, we will need institutions to find ideas, rather than institutions to kill them.

Once we have the former, I think we’ll do just fine without the latter.

(Photo by alles-schlumpf)

The MakerBot prints in ABS plastic, which you can buy from MakerBot Industries at eight dollars a pound, or about thirty cents per cubic inch.  This is less than one tenth of the cost of commercial 3D printing technologies I’ve looked at.  It’s about one percent the cost of having Shapeways do it.  (Using the Shapeways Cost Script reveals how wonderfully cheap this makes things.)

Now, these commercial technologies do buy you a few things, most importantly support materials and higher resolution.  A typical commercial printer can get down into feature sizes the current generation of MakerBot can only dream of.  But the pricing of MakerBot, and of the parts it makes, is important.

It’s important because the price difference is so very very stark.  One tenth the cost of production and one tenth the cost of ownership isn’t just less, it’s different.  A ten percent price break means you win out over the competition and sell more 3D printers.  A ninety percent price break means you sell printers to people who never would have remotely considered buying one otherwise.  Since the cost break extends to the price of material, they will also print things they never would have considered printing.

At these prices, I can think of a number of things which become cheaper to print than buy, many of which are already on Thingiverse: gear motors, plastic safety covers for outlets, pen holders (to say nothing of custom pen holders), project cases, pocket computer styluses, gaming dice, and so on.  The list is actually pretty long, I’d wager.  There is a time and energy cost of this sort of production: in most cases, models of anything more complex than the funnel will require post-processing.  I haven’t worked the numbers, but assigning a dollar value to the time one spends sanding plastics down will corrode the price break pretty readily.  But there is still a price break.

Having printed 3D objects make up a significant fraction of one’s semi-durable goods might not pay for itself very quickly, or with zero effort, but the very fact that it can even happen is a pretty meaningful change in the landscape.

(Gorgeous photo by Boeke)

I recently went to my local hardware store for a two-dollar pair of plastic calipers and started wandering the store, thinking about what digital fabrication might do to the place.  I wasn’t walking under the assumption we’ll be able to fabricate metal soon– I was only imagining what would happen if everyone in this store had a MakerBot/RepRap.

This isn’t a particularly ambitious hypothetical.  The people in a hardware store are the do-it-yourself people.  These are people who build things, people who use PVC piping, people who own more Dremel attachments than articles of cutlery.  In short, the prime market for personal fabrication.

I looked around, ticking things off that were or could be made of plastic, and the inventory shrank.  “Lightswitch covers, gone, plastic fittings, gone, plastic calipers, gone, ABS piping under X length, gone…” and then I started filling the empty shelves in my head back up.

Hardware stores already have great coils of things.  Chains, shielded wire, nylon rope, and these all remained in my hardware store of tomorrow.  And next to them, coils of ABS, HDPE, and PLA.  Bags of support mix, maybe something starch-based, wouldn’t be far off.  On the pegboards, extruder heads of varying diameters.

Would there be RepRaps?  Maybe.  But if there were, I doubt they’d be in big cardboard boxes full of styrene packing shapes.  I imagined a moderately-sized RepRap (Perhaps a 40-cm cube build area) next to the key-making machine (which will stick around ’till RepRaps can print metal) and a stack somewhere of complete electronic boards like this one, and steppers.

Of course, my vision is almost certainly wrong.  But the really exciting thing is that it will probably be far stranger than I’ve described.

A PLA object printed by Bre Pettis

In recent years, neurological interfaces of various kinds have been making a lot of news.  They’re making the deaf hear, the blind see, and replacing limbs.  So far, none of these replacements exceed the capabilities of the biological systems they replace.

Well.  Except possibly for those runner legs that caused that flap in the Olympics recently.

But these interfaces and machine mechanisms have applications for people without injuries or impairments.  Increasingly, body modifiers, people who go beyond mere tattoos to dying the whites of their eyes, constructing metal fins for themselves, and prosthetically altering their facial geometry, are looking to information technology to add kick to their threshold-chasing existences.

And the more things they implant in themselves, the more interest they’ll have in biocompatible plastics.

A sheath of biocompatible plastic can allow any piece of electronics to be implanted.  You could put a bluetooth transciever in your arm, LEDs inside your eyebrow, tiny speakers under the skin behind your ear, charged up by inductive loops and kept running by supercapacitors, without any significant ill effects.  (I’d still want them to be RoHS compliant though!)

Poly-lactic Acid (PLA) is one such plastic, and moreover, it’s a low-temperature thermoplastic.  You can print it.

Now, the outer details of such an implant aren’t especially important, unless you want the obvious bulge under the skin to look like something.  What’s important, is getting a good seal.  And concievably, a 3D printer could start a job, then print over a component so the plastic sealed and became stuck to the component.

A system that could watertight-encase electronics in biocompatible plastic, such as the described 3D print system, would allow cyborgs to add components to their electronic peripherals with comparative ease and safety.  Improvements in battery survivability (supercaps), increasing integration, and widespread availability of arbitrary-form-encasement technology just might be a combination that gets a lot of people, if not the mainstream, using implantable technology.

The term “cyborg” is probably nearing the tipping point from science-fiction terminology to social epithet, so I probably shouldn’t be brandishing it around anymore.  Barely more than a decade ago, one wouldn’t have hesitated to use the term to describe someone with cochliar implants, or motorized and neuro-electrically controlled prosthetic limbs, because such people were obviously characters in a science fiction story.  Now such people are people we know.  We might call those who are intentionally adding components to themselves “voluntary” cyborgs, but just as long hair on men became normal around the office, eventually these people won’t be so marginal.

And they might be making use of a lot of PLA.