# Global Swadeshi Dialogs - Smari McCarthy (Icelandic Fab Labs) and Vinay Gupta (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [333], part 1 of 2. 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=CkaiIaOfWO8. 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): Abundance via fabrication; context for productive camps.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - What is the Global Swadeshi Network? (2008): Founding statement of the Global Swadeshi Network, which he co-founded: Gandhi's swadeshi, economic...
  - 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)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy.
  - 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)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (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 (43%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (17%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Fab Lab (12 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); molecular assembly (4 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); digital freedom (3 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Global Swadeshi (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); free housing (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); local minima (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Pop-up (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); Afghanistan (2 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); Gandhi (2 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); Reykjavik (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 2 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): recycling
- Importance: core-text score 0.32 (1.00 is the top), number 228 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [340] Interview with Marcin of Open Source Ecology 25May08 (2012): same career work: What is the Global Swadeshi Network?
  - [56] [What is the Global Swadeshi Network? | The Bucky-Gandhi... (2008)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/56.md): same career work: What is the Global Swadeshi Network?
- 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=CkaiIaOfWO8; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [333], https://guptaoption.com/texts/333.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=0s) smart welcome to the second of the global swadeshi dialogues uh tell me who you are well um i'm born iceland i'm half irish uh i spent the first decade of my life living in england and what i'm sorry oh yeah yeah yeah it's terrible but um but after that i moved to iceland and uh onto this uh cluster of volcanic islands out in the middle of the north atlantic ocean and i've been here on and off ever since um so you're some kind of seasteader only it started kind of a thousand years ago yeah well um i think the oldest part of this island is about 17 000 years old so yeah but we've been growing it for a while yeah actually we had this eruption on this island in 1973 that crushed about uh 3000 houses and um kind of messed things up a bit when when was the westman islands settled uh it was settled around 1870. now 870. 870. okay yeah so you've had settlement there for about 1200 years and it's about 5 000 people is that right oh 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 four miles from the coast but it takes about um three hours by boat to get to the nearest harbor gotcha so it's really i mean it's not quite the ends 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 so you're in the western islands right now um 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 sunday club lab and i've been working on this for about a year i i got pulled into it um kicking and screaming about a year ago it's funny actually how that happened was i had seen the ted talk where uh neil gershenfeld is doing his uh his explanation of what fablabs are and um i kind of watched it and

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=150s) ignored it for a couple of months then about about almost exactly a year ago today um i suddenly remembered it and i was sitting 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 i found this email address fired off an email saying just hey who are you what are you doing tell me more 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 this on a friday and you know i was going to do something insane anyway so i bought a ticket and um that's kind of how i got involved with the fablab project yes uh after that i went 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 we we're just sitting around waiting for the equipment to arrive actually wow so you have to you have the space you've got an established area you're going to put the fab lab all that stuff is ready to go well we don't actually have the space yet we're hoping that will 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 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 these things are when you're starting from scratch in such a short time exactly um so yeah

[4:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=262s) 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've got all this this big government grant but that means we have to do outreach so they bought 50 000 worth of equipment and uh stuffed it into inner city boston where anybody could come and use user equipment and it kind of exploded from there the idea is make a laboratory where anybody can make anything uh and it's like the prelude to uh molecular assembly in the home where you'll have the star trek replicator or stevens you know where you can build your own island and go sea setting on it or um just uh whatever sort of assembly you wish 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 things for casting plastics and you know things for making little circuit boards and electronic components and solderers and i mean missing anything major there no no that's about it the all the equipment is well as far as we can it's computer controlled okay uh that being the innovation here uh i mean computer controlled uh cnc devices have been around 70's but uh what's changed is now we can suddenly of course put one in every town um you know every four thousand 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 fablab and um and making things for a one-man market will simply 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

[6:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=412s) powerful pentium style machine but it will do everything 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 studies uh networks devices for that yes uh and the idea is you've got this tablet network with 35 labs spread all over the world at the moment oh wait a minute so there are 35 of these things 35 is a rough estimate uh and it's the closest to the real figure that i've been able to find okay and they're 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 uh boston chicago um san diego you know you've got you've got all the usual suspects in there you've even got one in tokyo there's one at the top of norway just at the northernmost part of norway 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 yeah stay warmer 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 yeah they've all got roughly the same capability to make objects yes and to a very large degree the same equipment okay there's been some change out some some replacements but for the most projects 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 soweto and they can run off essentially the same object yes and uh actually we've got a uh public wired kit repository for designs oh that's interesting yeah 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

[9:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=562s) and i mean roughly how many things are in that repository i'm not that many um unfortunately there hasn't been that much uh useful stuff but there are a few gems in amongst uh and amongst the empty folders uh stuff like a like thinner client which is a very small computer that you hook up to a television oh yeah i saw pictures of these they're like 10 bucks or something like this and yeah you were even cheaper um wow yeah i think you should be able to do it for five bucks but uh don't quote me on that okay but hang on a second so you plug this thing into a 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 five dollars that you plug into a tv set yeah and that's your network well sure but i mean that in itself is really pretty significant yeah um then there's uh other things like i'm just imagining that you know a room full of those connected to like a bluetooth hub that would 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 rural mesh networks are definitely the thing i think of the future and carpeting entire 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 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 tinfoil yeah that's your special view oh absolutely well i mean you know in 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 cooking it yeah and you can do all manner of parabolics and non-imaging optics and all this kind of stuff

[11:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=712s) 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 the ability to take plans and just you know print them off on a device yeah um so pavlov's on the lowest level you've got you've got it you're used for innovation and seed seed companies startups that want to uh take some design and manufacture it and that in in cape town there's lots and lots of really good stuff doing going on with clothing designers and textiles actually you could cut that stuff on the fab machines as well yes exactly wow wearable electronics are actually coming in strong but when i was in chicago last august there was talk about 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 uh blinking a stop sign with leads 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 great safety device 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 uh 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 is getting water down or not yeah so the cream content of the milk is something that people want to measure um simple instrumentation for that has been made in the fablab so basically stick two wires into the milk and it will give you a readout saying how much uh how much cream is in the milk so that way you can gorge the pricing um and that kind of thing can lead to health benefits or or whatnot um moving even farther up you can do hardcore science with this and there we come into the entire environmental um environmental measuring system that i mentioned earlier

[14:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=862s) and a spin-off from that that i've been considering is here in the west mountains we have the biggest puffin call a colony in the world yeah it's about four or four million customs that's a lot of profits 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 uh yeah goodbye tastes bad i guess you evolved to like the taste of puffin i think you must have evolved to like the taste of puffing the one time i had it oh man but where did you have it someplace in reykjavik oh yeah see people don't know what to do with puffins that's way they turn so there are special puffin recipes of the western island so well generally you want to smoke the puffin and serve it with mustard okay i'll give that a try when i get out there just take my word but okay so one of the things is the cooking colony has been going uh it's been rapidly decreasing and uh since it's four million persons and we only have about um uh well less than a hundred thousand a year yeah you know it's hard to say that hunting is the main reason for it sure for sure so it's probably global warming or something related some kind of general environmental effect yeah and and the uh their main uh main feedstock is uh is a type of fish that's uh not really found in copious quantities around the islands anymore uh one of the things i've been considering is using the pop-up to construct um some sort of measurement devices to put in the putting holes uh to measure humidity and uh coming and going without the problems yes yes so uh that's uh that's something i i've been trying to organize but until i get la set up 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 i'd be great if i had a device that did xyz and then you figured out roughly how to make it knowing the capabilities of the labs you designed to the capabilities of the fabrication technology you have yeah and then you turn out specifically

[16:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=1012s) 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 or 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 it as a whole new tech tree really i mean um like if you take merchants open farm tech and you add a pavlov into that then suddenly you have this uh like um this set of technologies that first off do empowerment which is always the first thing when you get new technology then you have to educate the people around the technology then you start to build solutions to problems and then you start getting markets yeah so um and of course the market thing is uh something that um a lot of people wheel back in horror when you hear that but it's actually an interesting facet of the entire thing because once you have fablabs everywhere the market isn't is no longer centralized manufacturing and then you have global delivery but rather you have centralized well to some extent design yeah so 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 nike 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 configured to your foot from that basic parameterized model exactly and um if nike wants a business model after 20 years what they're going to have to do is stop sending 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 and uh homebrew right so at 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

[19:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=1162s) similar phenomena for fabs yeah or or rather the industrial revolution got it half right we're fixing the what they got wrong tell me more about that uh 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 people um like thomas newcomen in the in the 1790s with uh or actually no early 1700s with the machine uh for erasing water with fire which was uh intended to pump water out of mine shaft yeah 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 it's like the switch was flipped and suddenly it wasn't just people uh individuals building steam engines to solve problems but rather it was uh people with lots and lots of money buying and 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 you know desktop publishing right it was an example of something where this already happened you've got the laser printer and rather than having fifty thousand dollars worth of letter set kicking around you walked in with your your rage maker file and you printed off whatever it was and there was your camera already originals yeah similarly laser printers initially were about ten thousand dollars 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 fencers were invested long before the bubble jet yeah but laser printers were expensive and then there was somebody who said hey hang on bubble jets could be neat they could work um designed to bubble jet and i i can't remember which company it was but whoever owned the uh the design or the innovation there they said wait who

[21:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=1312s) who would ever want the bull jet it's crappy quality the the ink smears that you know counter all the faults of bubble jet technology and you know um no nobody wants it but they failed to factor in the small thing of price the reason the bubble jets got popular was because they were extremely expensive uh extremely cheap sorry and they were good enough yes yes yeah absolutely i mean the the worst is better thing is a pretty reliable rule yes yeah okay so uh the exact same thing you have um multi-million dollar 3d printers today that aren't actually all that good and then you've got adrian bowen's rap rap which it's not fancy it's not interesting uh for big companies but it's good enough for home use so um just for context tell me what the rap rap is okay uh the wrap up is a british design british idea and um adrian bowens 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-replication okay and this thing is basically a 3d printer right you you put into it and it makes shapes in the group yeah and then you click the shapes together and add some other electronics and it makes another one of these things which prints google exactly um and you can make anything with it you can uh well within the realm of what you can make by additive plastic placement but um the interesting thing about rapprock is that just i i just heard about it today they they have managed self-replication it still needs some assembly but they have managed to replicate a a rep it's a printer that prints printers yes and after they printed out the first copy they made the copy the child generate a grandchild wow so uh so now uh

[24:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=1462s) if you just put that into uh context uh exponential growth here say each creature only prints up two copies of itself then you have two to the power of n you know that that means um uh after 10 iterations you've got 1024 of these devices wow wow so what we're talking about is like lan 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 wii for the printer yeah and and all you need to scoop yes we must be where the patented goop barons yeah exactly um and of course this is going to lead to a lot of grey glue once you get nanotech sorted out well

[25:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=1517s) 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 martin 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 the first step and it's a big deal because it's like 300 pounds or something puts up 400 400 300 pounds yeah something like that yeah four hundred dollars 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 theoretical 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 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 that was one of the the big questions that um i was laid before the 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 no no i'm going to let you extrapolate on that well i mean you know in general this comes from whole systems thinking right that yeah it's much easier to get a large performance jump in a system than a small one 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

[27:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=1667s) 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 no 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 1980s 1980s richard Stallman asked okay why should people um

[28:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=1701s) not have the ability to edit their own uh software yeah software yeah 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 and let you record what you want to record yeah so you build another one that doesn't have those restrictions or even better you decide that you want your vcr to uh also be a telephone you have that functionality right right so what we're talking about here is taking the commercial bottleneck away from hardware development yeah 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 one 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 is designed and downloaded and tailored to your own needs so sort of cobbling together computer not computers coupling together consumer goods in the same way that we couple 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 which is digital television yes and and uh of course it's only a matter of time until somebody uh comes up with matchups for um you know what is the facebook physical object okay okay so um i i think with regards to digital this uh i say digital freedom this is a term

[29:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=1799s) that i use a lot meaning uh freedom applied to uh technology 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 to foundation for digital freedom yes yes so what we're talking about here is the scope of things that you're 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 see so that everybody can just download and modify and remix their their designs and so we really are in so free as in freedom territory here yes definitely because uh uh the entire goal of the pablo project 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 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 on its software or you fab the file and it's hardware exactly oh lord this is gonna get interesting isn't it oh yeah and and we haven't even gone into the entire um you know what about 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 the whole thing has this kind of extraordinary shriek at the end of it yeah exactly and you know the best you can do is try and you know lay it out some simple terms point to good projects that have given good results and you know that stuff like the wrap wrap and stuff like the textiles stuck in cape town yeah 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 simple easy to understand stuff now and yeah pay no

[32:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=1949s) attention to david dalrymple and what he's working on with this conformal computing business exactly yeah preferably pay no attention to mr davrum it's all part of the show there's nothing to see here right right right so just just the 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 six to the pipe yeah 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 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 machines what like a molecular scale connection machine yeah so vast kind of bit plane processing with simple molecular steps yes 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 uh i know uh 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 mapper 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 nano scale stuff you know off in this direction okay um the question here is why is this

[34:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=2081s) important and the answer is probably that um if you look at how industry is done today um even in the pub labs it's very brute force sure you're sure you're using you know you're using force to after the um uh atomic structure of things like metal right right blow torches hacksaws yeah and real macro scale you know machine tool force yeah 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 have because not only are you wasting precious material uh that you know uh all the waste from the process you're also wasting a lot of energy yes so yeah like moving 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 convince nature to build the ship course 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 let me break that down here so you know i'm reminded of richard feynman's story where he's got a house full of apps and what he starts doing is laying sugar trails or he's what is it he starts moving the animals out of his house so they lay a trail away from the house rather than towards it or something like this yeah and after a while all the ants are redirected around his house and there's no problem and if richard tyneman had been a computer scientist living today instead of leaving the arts out of the house he would have been um you know making logic gates with them so what you're talking about here when you so there's three steps here right the first is looking at nature as a computer

[37:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=2231s) the second is persuading nature to do the computations that we want and the third is not going insane in the process so okay okay i'll agree as an example of this right they did analog computers in the 50s where you had things like a bucket that had a shape of a parabola on the as the shape of the bucket so as you poured liquid into it it essentially computed the volume under the curve for that specific equation of bucket shape yeah and they could chain these things together to do um you know rapid computation and things like economic systems you had a series of buckets and pipes that matched your theory about the economy and then you poured liquid into various buckets and the system settled in equilibria and it told you what the overall performance would be yeah so you're talking about like that only without water and buckets yes you um you're still using the fundamental forces nature uh but you're using them in a much more precise way so now we're talking about things like molecular computing or tricking your e coli into performing functions or things like that yeah uh actually dna is a perfect example of that because we've been we've been messing around with the efi for for decades uh it was the first uh genome that was mapped by humans as far as i know um it's a very small genome it's only about uh 1 000 um uh 1 000 you know the word i'm talking about well uh basically jeans jeans okay yeah a thousand base pairs would be too small yeah yeah it's 250 000 base pairs give or take so it's really small and um all life on earth is built based on 23 um amino acids which which the dna codes for so you have the dna coding for these 23 amino acids they make proteins the proteins fold up and then you have a functionality yes so one thing that uh saul griffith did a couple of years ago was uh he figured out a way to do the exact the same thing as proteins are doing except with magnets oh i think i saw a video of this yeah right he had this long plasticky thing of magnets and then there was a machine that shook them or something yeah or uh i can't i think it was different colors coded for different uh like different colors of the shapes or

[39:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=2381s) different the colors have different magnets attached yeah yeah yeah that was it uh so they would fold in different ways and make arbitrary shapes yes and and there's other people who've been working on the same thing there's uh hud lipson has been doing lots of great stuff on that okay okay so what we're talking about here is there's there's currently a gap right you've got this kind of molecular level dna level game down here and then you've got these self-replicating machine shops up here yeah and what you're talking about is over a period of time building a bridge from both sides to the point where you have kind of a self-replicating nano scale machine shop yes where you say bucket of goo make me a shoe and there's your shoe exactly and um and there's two different modes of attack from this one is coming from the uh the research side where you're actually trying to do the nanoscale ingenuity yes and the other is coming at it from the uh cultural side where you're sticking a pablob into a small town and you know opening up the doors and saying you know what are you going to do with it um this is done uh from my point of view for two reasons yes one is to get people accustomed to technology as it's arriving push out the new technology as it drives and you know get all the interesting synergy effects from that okay the other is to safeguard the freedom which is to say well so i mean the freedom that we're talking about here is essentially the freedom to perform magic right yeah to take to take a bucket of stuff and turn it into the shoe that you want as a fundamental freedom of action kind of a thing right yeah because what happens in the current uh patent law environment if um suddenly this molecular assembly technology comes into existence and there's this one company that patents it sure i mean this happened with some basic things in computing right yeah um public key cryptography was patented like the rsa algorithm was patented for a long time and that was a huge issue yeah it was and and it um you could say that it contributed to the um the lack of strong crypto amongst

[42:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=2531s) common people today i mean how many people absolutely knowingly used from crypto i mean the reason that the reason that strong crypto isn't built into all of our operating systems at a fundamental level is because it just wasn't legal to do that when the operating systems were being built yeah exactly yeah so no i'd agree completely yeah so uh imagine if uh if movable type printing had been patented now that would have slowed down the entire adoption process for removal type which well in fact there's a bunch of history about this right the early printing presses are licensed and controlled by the crown and you could only print what the crown said was okay too and that was the foundation copyright so there's always this i mean there's been uh control being uh put on to people for a long time i mean uh freedom of speech was severely impaired by the catholic church uh back in the the um uh inquest or is punishing position and all that stuff yeah and well actually they're still trying today but not working they don't have much stuff ask the liberation theologists in south america you know how effectively the catholic church can muzzle people yeah you know i mean it's not a small consideration that you had this unification of christianity and essentially human rights oriented and the catholic church came down on it with a sledgehammer so um so first they were controlling uh controlling stuff yeah and you know there's always somebody trying to consult nowadays it's the owners of patents sure they are they are trying to rule the people of earth with a very hard disk and i mean this gets down to the this you know partnership between capital and the state right the copyright and patent are essentially rights which primarily relate to capital and then the state is kind of in partnership with these entities like you see this in america where all these large corporations own news outlets and use patent and you know and use copyright particularly to form this kind of walk-on content yeah yeah the um the uh the neoconservative libertarian uh wing of people who who say uh oh we should minimize the government they want the government out of the way except they still want the

[44:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkaiIaOfWO8&t=2681s) legislative wing to exist to make sure that their patents and their copyrights are you know maintained well sure i mean you know i wrote a short article on this a while ago about um you if you're going to get the government out of things like marriage you should also get out of the business of incorporating companies and then if you run the numbers you know limited the limited liability corporation is essentially a government subsidy in the form of free insurance to the shareholder yeah so you're basically marrying the shareholders to each other and saying instead of running a home you should run a certain function right and you know why why should the government be involved in creating a subsidy for shareholders any more than it should be involved in you know subsidizing something else you know needless to say most people don't like this idea very much the corporation is a great movie on that um uh naomi klein's uh you know she writes wonderful articles and books on on exactly the subject so sorry go on please so okay um by pushing out the technology as it arrives and trying to maintain the uh the like um make sure the technology always exists for everybody in a free and accessible way we are make making sure that the technology isn't taken over by um by any sort of monopolization monopolizing entity okay and that's a very important thing because you give somebody the power to do magic then they will use it badly unless everybody has that ability now that's a very heavy thing to say oh yeah yeah i know i i'm vaguely post hippy so notionally right what you're talking about here is that if you had a sort of microsoft of digital fabrication it would or um i mean microsoft is actually not really a good example because microsoft still operated in a somewhat competitive environment but if you go back to you know the the great trusts of 19th century america i mean these enormous institutions that just made and broke law and you know practically owned the country at some points so you have this enormous drop in the production costs for a large class of goods monopolized under patent and you wind up with this enormous you know the staff company

---
Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/333-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [333] Global Swadeshi Dialogs - Smari McCarthy (Icelandic Fab Labs) and Vinay Gupta, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.