# Global Swadeshi Dialogs - Smari McCarthy (Icelandic Fab Labs) and Vinay Gupta

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [330]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2012-05-04 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Local fabrication as a basis for self-reliant economies.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Copyright and the digital economy: a case for reason (2010): Short paper proposing land law, with rights of way and trespass, as a better model for copying than theft:... (suggested by machine)
  - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: fab / yes / laser (56%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: digital freedom (3 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Fab Lab (4 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); molecular assembly (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Afghanistan (2 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); Tell Me Who You Are (1 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 2 undated); India (2 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); jobs (1 here; 85 sources in all, earliest dated 2003, 4 undated); markets (1 here; 159 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 6 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): digital freedom; molecular assembly
- Importance: core-text score 0.28 (1.00 is the top), number 271 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [245] [Vinay Gupta - Fab 16 presentation (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/245.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
  - [272] Interview with Rob Knight (hexayurt vc) and Dominic Tarr... (2016): close in content (cosine 0.94)
- On the same works, just before: [354] [The Future We Deserve - 2 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/354.md); [240] [The Future We Deserve — Introduction (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/240.md); [210] [The Future We Deserve (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/210.md)
- On the same works, just after: [321] [Vinay Gupta talking at FreeAndReal / The Telaithrion... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/321.md); [322] [Vinay Gupta at the Athens Hackerspace, 2012 September 2 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/322.md); [408] [H4D2 review (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/408.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Global Swadeshi Dialogs - Smari McCarthy (Icelandic Fab Labs) and Vinay Gupta, video, 2012-05-04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [330], https://guptaoption.com/texts/330.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=0s) smart welcome to the second of the global swesi dialogues uh tell me who you are well um I'm born in Iceland I'm half Irish uh I spent the first decade of my life living in England what I'm sorry oh yeah yeah yeah it's terrible is it um but after that I moved uh to Iceland and uh onto this uh cluster of volcanic islands out out in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean and I've been here on enough ever since um so you're some kind of seader only it started kind of a thousand years ago yeah well um I think the oldest part of this island is about 177,000 years old so yeah but but we've been growing it for a while actually uh we had this eruption on this island in 1973 that crushed about uh 3,000 houses and um kind of messed things up a bit mhm how when when was the Westman Islands settled uh it was settled around 1870 no 870 18870 okay yeah so you've had settlement there for about 12200 years yeah and it's about 5,000 people is that right uh yeah roughly okay and it's a little Stone dot in the middle of the North Atlantic how far from the Icelandic Coast um we're about 4 miles from the coast but it takes about um 3 hours by boat to get to the nearest harbor got so it's really I mean it's not quite the end of the Earth but it's pretty close yeah uh yeah it's it's definitely one of the corners of the world yes excellent excellent so anyway I so you're in the Westman Islands right now um yes tell me what it is that you're doing okay so uh I'm currently working for the Icelandic Innovation Center trying to set up the first Icelandic fablab uh and uh I've been working on this for about a year I I got pulled into it um kicking and screaming about a year ago uh it's funny actually how that happened was uh I had seen the Ted Talk where uh Neil gersfeld is doing his uh his explanation of what fablabs are and um I kind of watched it and ignored it

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=150s) for a couple of months then about about almost exactly a year ago today um I suddenly remembered it and I was sitting in in an office just a couple of rooms away from here and I thought hang on this might actually be a good idea so I Googled it I tried to find out what I could uh found this email address fired off an email saying just hey who are you what are you doing tell me more uh 15 minutes later I get this boilerplate wall of text describing the project and at the bottom of it there's this footnote saying oh by the way uh we're having this conference in Norway on Tuesday do you want to come and this is on this is on a Friday and you know I was going to do something insane anyway so I bought the ticket and um that's kind of how I got involved with the faab project yes uh after that I went um uh went into the entire uh convincing people and raising funds gig and um a couple of trips to the states um and now we're almost ready to set things up um we we're just sitting around waiting for the equipment to arrive actually wow so you have the you have the space you've got an established area you're going to put the Fab Lab all that stuff is ready too well we don't actually have the space yet we're hoping that'll come through tomorrow okay so you're right in the middle of you have the funding and you're just getting everything organized to put little boxes on the ground exactly it's uh it's actually uh it's in a mess at the moment but that's the way it should be it's fun that way well I mean that's the way you things are when you're starting from scratch in such a short time exactly um so yeah so um what is a Fab Lab well um it's it's started off as this project in MIT where they uh thought okay we got all this this big government grant but that means we have to do Outreach so they bought $50,000 dollar worth of equipment and uh stuffed it into inner city Boston where anybody could come and use use your equipment and it kind of exploded from there um the idea is make a laboratory where anybody can make anything mhm

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=300s) uh and it's like the Prelude to uh molecular assembly in the home where you'll have the Star Trek replicator or or Steven sonan uh nanite you know where you can build your own Island and go Seas setting on it or um just uh whatever sort of of assembly you wish mhh um so this is like in the middle it's it's the bootstrapping phase so I mean let me put this into context you've got $50,000 worth of tools and that's little laser cutters and little robotic machine tools and uh things for casting Plastics and you know things for making little circuit boards and electronic components and solderers and I I mean I'm missing anything major there no no that's about it uh all the equipment is uh well as far as we can it's computer controlled okay that being the Innovation here uh I mean computer controlled uh CNC devices have been around 70s but uh what's changed is now we can suddenly afford to put one in every town um you know every 4,000 person town in in the world yes and that's what's cool about this yes so and soon every school will be able to afford a fa lab and uh and making things for a Onan Market will suddenly be possible and plausible so this is sort of like 21st century shop class where you have a bunch of these serious machines that can make serious things and I mean we're talking about you could go in here and you could basically build a transistor radio complete with the cool little waterproof plastic case and the knobs and all the rest of that yeah that's sort of the level of complexity on that side of it well uh you can actually go one up on that and just build your own computer from scratch I mean it won't be a a powerful pantium style machine but it will do everything a a computer is expected to do yes um so uh there's uh there's plans to do environmental um environmental measurements like uh doing humidity and temperature just so these uh networked devices for that yes uh and the idea is you've got this tlab network with 35 Labs spread all over the world at the moment oh wait a minute hang on so there are 35 of these things 35 is a rough

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=450s) estimate uh and it's the closest to the real figure that I've been able to find okay and they're s of dotted around I mean they're mostly in America they're where are they yeah there's four in South Africa there's one in Ghana there's two in Kenya um and then there's U Boston Chicago um San Diego you know you got you got all The Usual Suspects in there you've even got one in Tokyo um there's one at the the top of Norway just at the northernmost part of Norway um there's one in rural India and they're setting up one in Afghanistan at the moment in jalalabad oh that's Dave Warner's thing right yes Dave Warner exactly yeah um and they're popping up all over the place okay so these little shops are all kind of much alike right it's the same roughly standard set of equipment in each shop so they've all got roughly the same capability to make objects yes and and to a very large degree the same equipment okay um there's been some change outs some some Replacements but for the most part it's uh every lab should be equivalent okay so theoretically if you design something that can be manufactured in the Icelandic Fab you can send those designs across the you know the Fab in Cape Town or Soo and they can run off essentially the same object yes and uh actually we've got a uh paab wide K repository for designs oh that's interesting yes um now is that a recent thing no it's uh it's been going on for at least a year okay so there's a so it's a distributed version control system for sets of plans which have been tested and can be made inside of a Fab MH and I mean roughly how many things are in that repository uh not that many um unfortunately there hasn't been that much uh useful stuff but there are a few gems in amongst uh in amongst the empty folders uh stuff like um a a like thinner client which is a very small computer that uh you hook up to a television um oh yeah I saw pictures of these they're like 10 bucks or something like this and you yeah you were even cheaper um wow yeah I think you should be able to do it for five books but uh don't quote me on that okay hang on second so you plug this thing into a

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=600s) computer and it gen sorry into a television and it generates the appropriate signals to display like text on the screen yeah okay and it's just a text console um and it's like uh like one of the old um like uh teletype terminals okay so it's like a dumb it's like a dumb terminal for $5 that you plug it into a TV set yeah and that's Network well sure but that I mean that in itself is really pretty significant yeah um then there's uh other things like um I'm just imagining that you know a room full of those connected to like a Bluetooth Hub that you know hanging off a telephone acting as a relay to some cell tower or something I mean that right there is the kind of computing that you could do almost anywhere on Earth um yeah rural uh rural mesh networks are definitely the thing the thing of the future and that um carpeting towns with wireless network is one of the things I'm very interested in there's been a lot of work been done in the fablabs over the last year uh on uh designing antennas interesting making uh High highly High Gain uh durable antennas uh out of glass and tin foil wow excellent well you know I mean anything involving glass and thin foil yeah that's your specialty isn't it oh absolutely well I mean you know in uh Afghanistan they've been talking about having a solar cooker design competition where you know you can obviously you can use the laser cutters on cardboard to produce you know precisely the shape that you want and then cover the thing with tin foil and then cook in it and you can do all manner of parabolics and non-imaging Optics and all this kind of stuff you can cut plastic and glass for enclosures to hold the heat there's all kinds of really amazing stuff that you can do if you've got got the ability to take plans and just you know print them off on a device yeah um so cloudlabs on the lowest level you've got um you got it used for Innovation and Seed uh seed companies startups that want to uh take some design and manufacture it and that uh in in Cape Town there's lots and lots of really good stuff doing going on with uh clothing designers and textiles oh you can cut that stuff on the Fab machines as well yes exactly

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=750s) wow wearable electronics are actually coming in strong um but wow from c town uh I'm or just in or just in general in the network in general in general I mean uh when I was in Chicago last August there was talk about um making a vest for biking uh that had like a stop sign on the back that uh so if cars came within 10 meters of you uh it would start blinking a blinking a stop sign with leads on your back wow wow so you'd actually have a detector that would Point backwards and it would be like it's very simple to make and you know it's a couple of hours worth of effort and then you've got a a a great safety device mhh um and then if we move up one level uh past the the novelty items we've got uh important stuff like instrumentation for rural areas um like in India there's been a lot of work put into um one one of the problems they have there is um when buying milk in the market you never really know if the milk has been watered down or not yes so the cream content of the milk is something that people want to measure and simple instrumentation for that has been made in the PB lab so basically you stick two wires into the milk and it'll give you a readout saying how much uh how much cream is in the milk wow so that way you can gge the pricing um and that kind of thing can lead to health benefits or or whatnot um moving even further up you can do hardcore science with this um and then we come into the entire environmental um environmental measuring system that uh I mentioned earlier MH um and a spin-off from that that I've been considering is uh in Western Island we have the biggest Puffin colony in the world yes uh about four four million puffins that's a lot of puffet yeah it's quite a big Colony yeah I expect it's gotten a little bigger since people stop eating them regularly oh no we still eat them really and yeah Puffin tastes bad no Puffin tastes I guess you evolved to like the taste of puffin what I think you must have evolved to like the tast of puffing the one time I had it oh man where did you

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=900s) have it h someplace in ruic oh yeah see people in reg don't know what to do with puffins they don't way they turn so there are special Puffin recipes of the West man high on so well generally H you want to smoke the Puffin and uh serve it with mustard okay I'll I'll give that a try when I get out there just take my word for it but okay uh so so one of the things is the Ping Colony has been going uh it's been rapidly decreasing and uh since it's 4 million Puffin and we only H about um uh well less than 100,000 a year yes you know it's hard to say that hunting is the main reason for this sure so it's probably global warming or or something related some kind of General environmental effect yeah and and the uh their main uh main pie stck is uh is a type of fish that's uh not really found in in copious quantities around the islands anymore mhm so uh one of the things I've been considering is using the pbl to construct um some sort of measurement devices to put in the puffing holes uh to measure humidity and comings and going of the puffins yes yes so uh that's uh that's something I've been trying to organize but until I get lab set up here here I can't actually move forward with that so I mean this is very interesting what you're talking about here is the fablab as an enabling technology for other projects that you get into a situation where ah it'd be great if I had a device that did XYZ and then you figure out roughly how to make it knowing the capabilities of the labs you design to the capabilities of the fabrication technology you have and then you turn out specifically the tool for the problem that you have exactly I mean what it gives me this image of is like you know they talk about um you know utility utility trees where you have this kind of you know fractal you know manipulator that it's this thing of like industrial production produces these great big metal slabs and the Fab Lab produces like this kind of you know kind of adaptive tentacle that gets right down into your problem and solves exactly what you need to do that it's a way of like pushing technology into the nukes and crannies of the problem yeah and uh you can think of there's a whole new Tech Tree really I

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=1050s) mean um like if you take Marchin open Farm Tech and you add a p lab into that then suddenly you have this uh like um uh this sort set of technologies that uh first of do empowerment which is always a first thing when you get a new technology um then you have to educate the people around the technology then you start to um build solutions to problems and then you start getting mark markets yes so um and of course the market thing is is something that um a lot of people real back in horror when you hear that but uh it it's actually an interesting facet of the entire thing because once you have pabs everywhere the market isn't uh is no longer um centralized manufacturing and then you have Global delivery but rather you have um centralized well to some extent design yes then you ship the designs all over the place and they get manufactured locally to whatever quantity is required so this is the sort of idea that your Nik you know produces a sort of shoe template that you then ship out to the Fab Lab locally that will run you off a shoe configure to your foood from that basic parameterized model exactly and um if mik wants a business model after 20 years what they're going to have to do is stop selling shoes and start start selling shoe designs that people can just print out in their homes interesting interesting so I mean there's an implicit assumption here that in the same way that computers went from being what's the name of the West Coast Computer Club for jobs in uh Bosnia started Homebrew right so had Homebrew Computer Club where people made their own computers and from that came the personal computer Revolution it sounds like what you're talking about is the anticipation of a similar phenomena for Fabs yeah or or rather um the Industrial Revolution C it half right we're fixing the what they got wrong tell me more about that no okay uh industry was never intended to be owned by by uh huge conglomerates okay what it was like um the first people who were introducing uh industry were were people um like uh Thomas newom in the in the 1790s with uh or actually no early 1700s with the machine uh for erasing water

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=1200s) with fire which was uh intended to pump water out of M shaft yes so it was the first steam engine from there on you have all sorts of um uh minor breakthroughs leading up to the Industrial Revolution and then suddenly uh it's like the flip uh switch was flipped and suddenly it wasn't just people uh individuals building steam engines to solve problems but rather was uh people with lots and lots of money buying an uh buying a whole set of steam engines and then using them to uh try and centralize the entire Workforce yes so what we're doing now is we're taking that back we're we're decentralizing the workforce decentralized industry yeah putting industry into the hands of the people because that's where technology always belongs interesting interesting so so uh you know desktop publishing right was an example of something where this already happened you got the laser printer and rather than having $50,000 worth of LR set kicking around you walked in with your you know rang maker file and you printed off whatever it was and there was your camera already Originals yeah similarly Laser Printers initially were about $10,000 and now I think they've come down to about 120 you you know the story of how the bubble jet came into uh came into being no I don't okay well the thing is laser Laser Printers were invented long before the bubble jet yes but Laser Printers were expensive and then there was somebody who said hey hang on uh bubble Jets could be neat they could work MH um designed a bubble Jet and uh I I can't remember which company it was but whoever owned the the design or The Innovation there they said wait who who would ever want a bubble jet it's crappy quality the the ink smears it uh you know count up all the faults of Buble jet ink technology and you know um no nobody wants it but they failed to factor in the small thing of price uhhuh the reason bubble Jets got popular was because they were extremely expensive uh extremely cheap sorry and they were good enough yes yes absolutely I the the worse is better thing is a pretty reliable rule yes yeah okay so uh the

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=1350s) exact same thing you have um multi million doll 3D printers today that aren't actually all that good ah and then you've got Adrian Bowen's rep Raph which it's not fancy it's not interesting uh for big companies but it's good enough for home use so and just for context tell me about the rep Rapids okay the r is a British design British idea and um Adrian Bowen uh who's working on that he um he set off with the goal of um well building a machine that can be one human bootstrap that is to say build a machine that is fully capable of self plication okay and this thing is basically a 3D printer right you you grou into it and it makes shapes in the goop yeah and then you click the shapes together and add some other electronics and it makes another one of these things which prints goop exactly you um and you can make anything with it you can uh well within the realm of what you can make by um additive plastic uh placement but um the interesting thing about rap is that just I just heard about it today they they have managed self replication M it still needs some assembly but they have managed to replicate a a rep app so uh it's a printer that prints printers yes exactly and and printed out the first copy um they made the copy the child generate a grandchild wow so uh so now uh if you just put that into uh context EXP growth here mhm um say each printer only prints out two copies of itself then you have two to the power of n you know that that means um uh after 10 eight durations you've got 1,24 of these devices wow wow so what we're talking about is like land parties where people bring their printers and print off more printers and everybody goes home with an additional printer like all the people who came without a printer leave with a printer yeah and and all you need is goop

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=1500s) yes we must Beware of the patented goop baret yeah exactly um and of course this is going to lead to a lot of gray goo once you get NCH sorted out well you know I'm still worry about that I was say I'm I'm still skeptical about the thermodynamics of nanotech but I mean just I mean this is a pretty historic thing right you having a machine with which you can make copies of the machine this is what Marchin was talking about last week this idea that you've got a set of machine tools which can be applied to Raw stock to produce more copies of those Machine Tools yes and um is a very unfancy version of this but it works that's that's a first step and I mean and it's a big deal because it's like 300 pound or something puts at 400 $400 £300 yeah something like that yeah $400 for a machine that is capable of breaking the volume barrier which is now once you've broken that barrier um you can essentially make anything now when you say volume barrier you're talking about um the price per unit for a small batch rather than a big batch of an object no um the the theorethical barrier of what you can create what you can make oh okay sorry explain please so um making things uh always requires tools right so um you get a tool that um that you get a spanner and you can make anything that requires only a spanner to make yes so if you get a tool that is capable of creating a perfect copy of itself then that tool is capable of creating well um where's the limit mhh that was one of the the big questions that uh that was laid forth 1950s and nobody's been able to answer yet right right you know what's amazing is as the more insane the idea the easier it is to make go on no no I'm going to let you extrapolate on that you know well I mean you know in general this comes from Whole systems thinking right that it's much easier to get a large performance jump in a system than a small one

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=1650s) because for the small performance jump you take lots of little improvements and for the big performance jump you sit down and say okay what are we actually trying to do here and then you find the simplest way of doing it and yeah okay um so I mean so okay um let's try attacking this from a different angle for a moment yes okay um what does this mean for personal freedoms oh well um the ability to print the ability to print my own shoes doesn't obviously immediately turn into more freedom yes exactly um the reason this is an interesting question is because uh in the 1980 1980s Richard Stallman asked okay why should people um not have the ability to edit their own uh software you know fix software yes okay the same applies why should I not be able to grow my own house okay okay so your VCR comes with some dumb set of restrictions it won't let you record what you want to record yeah so you build another one that doesn't have those restrictions mhm or even better um you decide that you want your VCR to uh also be a telephone you add that functionality right right so what we're talking about here is taking the commercial bottleneck away from Hardware development yes so I can finally get my little device that has an actual usable keyboard but otherwise almost no computing power yeah I want when I build it if you want when I give you the plans you build it make your own or or even better go go find some uh free Hardware that somebody else has designed and download it and and tailor it to your own needs so sort of cobbling together computer uh not computers coupling together consumer goods in the same way that we coup together software exactly you get a library and it's the TV Digital television library and you plug that into your device and now you've got a surfboard that watches Digital television yes and and and uh of course it's only a matter of time until somebody uh comes up with matchups for um sure you know what is the Facebook and physical object oh okay okay so um I think with regards to digital fre this uh I I say digital Freedom this is a term that I use a lot

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=1800s) meaning uh Freedom applied to uh technology or anything that can be digitized so not freedom to show people the digit if you don't like what they're telling you to do well no because um yeah okay yeah Freedom two foundation for digital Freedom yes yes so what we're talking about here is the scope of things that you allowed to make right yeah when you say digital Freedom you know here's a file it contains an object if you produce this object is the object legal or illegal yeah and why why not make everything open and free so that everybody can just download and and modify and remix their their designs and know so we really are in free as in Freedom territory here yes definitely because uh uh the entire goal of the fabl pro object uh it came out of this lab called the center for bits and atoms the Mandate which is to bridge the gap between bits and atoms yes and it makes sense why why should digital reality be somehow different fundamentally from physical reality so free speech expressed as objects yeah why not you speak into a you speak into a file then you run the file and its software or you Fab the file and its Hardware exactly oh Lord this is going to get interesting isn't it oh yeah and and we haven't even gone into the entire um you know what about uh what happens when you start looking at the universe as a computer you know what can it compute yeah the thing is in this entire digital fabrication uh context there's so much ground to cover and so much of it is still within the realm of the impossible that you know um coherent discourse is almost impossible right right and the whole thing has this kind of extropia shriek at the end of it yeah exactly and you know the best you can do is try and you know lay it out in simple terms point at good projects that have given good results and you know that's stuff like the rep R and stuff like the textiles stuff in Cape toown yes and you just keep pointing at that kind of stuff and and eventually you just hope that people will figure it out right so it's lots of so you're talking about the small small simple easy to understand stuff now and

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=1950s) pay no attention to David D rmle and what he's working on with this conformal Computing business exactly yes precisely right pay no attention to Mr Dar yeah no it's all part of the show there's nothing to see here right right right so just the just to bust David on this he's working on computers that you measure by volume so you get three pints of a computer and it's five times more powerful than a sixth of the Pint yes so it's it's computer goo that self organizes to do your computations based on volume exactly well not necessarily based on volume but um uh one of the Core Concepts in this as far as I understand it is uh using cellular automata for distributed um atomic scale Computing okay okay so oh oh wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait so molecular scale connection machines what like a molecular scale connection machine yes so vast kind of bit plane processing with simple molecular steps yeah think about you know um how can you calculate the exact value of pi using Lego bricks if you have a few hundred million Lego bricks you can get pretty close you know just by drawing a circle and Counting yeah yeah um or even better um you know what what this essentially does uh the stuff that Neil I know David is working on sorry is it puts the entire programming thing it takes it out of the text editor and puts it into the paint program okay programmable matter yes yeah yeah yeah yeah okay so you have a bucket of Goo you take a piece of software you drop the software on a chip let's say into the bucket of goo and the bucket of Goo grows into a sculpture that purifies the air around it yeah I mean straight down the line implementation of nanoscale stuff you know off in this direction okay um the question here is why is this important and the answer is probably that um if you look at how industry is done today um even in the Fab Labs it's very Brute Force sure you're sure you're using you know using Force to alter the

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=2100s) um atomic structure of of things like metal right right blow torches hacksaws Ian real macro scale you know Machine Tool force and you you use brute force long enough on a sheet of metal and you might end up with a ship but it's Brute Force it's not the most elegant way to do it it's not a very it's not even a very um you know um good way of using the resources you haveh because not only are you wasting precious material uh you know uh all the waste from the process you're also wasting a lot of energy yes so yeah like eting a curve into a piece of metal is it's an intensive process yeah so um what we should be doing is not so much uh using the hammer to build the ship but rather convinced nature to build the ship for us and that comes into the line of um looking at nature as a computer and trying to get it to compute to generate the objects we need okay just whoa let me break that down here so you know I'm reminded of Richard Fan's story where he's got house full of outs and what he starts doing is laying sugar Trails or he what is it he starts moving the ants out of his house so they lay a trail away from the house rather than towards it or

[1:17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRQ5p800I&t=4650s) well um you know we were going to try and keep this to half an hour we've now gone to an hour and a half but I think very good stuff and thank you thank you so much for doing this smart all right well no problem and I'm looking forward to next

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End of [330] Global Swadeshi Dialogs - Smari McCarthy (Icelandic Fab Labs) and Vinay Gupta. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [321](https://guptaoption.com/texts/321.md) Vinay Gupta talking at FreeAndReal / The Telaithrion... (2012); the most closely related, [245](https://guptaoption.com/texts/245.md) Vinay Gupta - Fab 16 presentation (2021); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.