As I pointed out in the Dercuano introductory text, Dercuano contains much that is correct and original, but mostly what is original is not correct, and what is correct is not original. I think that phrase originated as a clever insult to somebody’s poor work, but in a sense it’s just the default state of human cognition: most of the new ideas we come up with are wrong, while most of our ideas are not new, and since correct ideas have better memetic fitness (all else being equal) our unoriginal ideas tend toward correctness. With enough focused effort it’s possible to figure out which original ideas are true, and if I were capable, I would have made that effort before making Dercuano public, but I haven’t managed it in many years.
On the other hand, there’s a third axis along which ideas can be evaluated, aside from (probable) correctness and originality: consequences or interestingness.
In Approaches to 3-D printing in sandstone, for example, it says that in Argentina in 2017, ordinary gray portland cement cost US$0.26 per kg, while the white grade cost about three times as much. Conceivably nobody has made this observation before, and quite probably it is a correct observation, so it is likely correct and, in a minimal sense, original. But it really matters very little whether the price ratio was 1:2 or 1:3 or 1:4 in Argentina in 2017, though conceivably that may someday be of interest to some historian of concrete; this knowledge enhances your capabilities very little.
At the other end of the spectrum, consider Becquerel’s observation in 1896 that, even in the dark, potassium uranyl sulfate blackened photographic plates left nearby, as if they were spontaneously emitting X-rays, which of course they were. The observation was hardly more creative than my note above about the ratio of prices of different kinds of cement, merely an observation of an unexpected and unexplained labwork problem in a footnote of a paper. However, upon further investigation, this observation answered the mystery of how the sun could keep burning for billions of years; provided a source of energy that did not emit CO₂ and required a tiny amount of fuel to a substantial part of humanity; made it possible to send space probes to the outer planets; changed the nature of warfare and ended World War II; revealed the existence of entirely unsuspected types of matter in the universe; and was a key part of the evidence for special relativity, which revealed that mass and energy were not two separate quantities, but the same quantity.
But the consequences of an idea are very situational, whether we’re talking about its logical consequences (the other propositions that its truth would entail) or its practical consequences (the results in the contingent world of its putative truth becoming known).
From the proposition, “Socrates is a man,” we cannot deduce that Socrates is mortal; nor can we deduce it from the proposition, “All men are mortal.” But if either proposition is known, the other has as a logical consequence the proposition that Socrates is mortal. So it is that the logical consequences of an idea depend on what else is known.
The practical consequences of Hero’s aeolipile were, famously, almost nil; but under somewhat different historical circumstances, steam-engines revolutionized industry in the 18th century. Condorcet voting made no impact on the USA’s political processes for at least two centuries, and the USA continues electing incompetent demagogues; Condorcet voting ensures that Debian’s project leaders are widely respected. Oil drilling in the Song dynasty lowered the price of salt; oil drilling in Pennsylvania made horse-drawn carriages obsolete. Cellphones in the US were relegated to executive status toys until the 2000s; cellphones in India allowed farmers and fishermen to capture what were previously middlemen’s profits. Movable type in the Song enabled the preservation of much of the Chinese literary canon, while movable type in Europe gave birth to the Reformation, liberalism, and the Westphalian state. So it is that the practical consequences of an idea depend on what else is practiced.
Here I’m not concerned with the practical consequences of “big ideas” that turned out to be false, like the inevitable withering away of the socialist state or the inevitable triumph of Daesh over “Rome”, but only ideas whose consequences would be big if true.
So, what ideas in Dercuano could have big consequences, if they turn out to be correct? And why?
One of the main themes of the last several years of Dercuano has been “clanking replicators” — more precisely autotrophic programmable self-replicating 3-D printers, and especially how to achieve autotrophic replication of the control computer necessary to control the printer’s actuators.
A workable self-replication design is big, if true, because it totally upends the principles of economics, in a way which I think will substantially improve the material well-being of the average human by reducing opportunities for oppression. I think the change will be more important than the Industrial Revolution, more important than the development of agriculture, possibly more important than fire. I go into somewhat more detail on the expected economic effects in Exponential technology and capital, Gardening machines, and Self replication changes, and there’s a fictionalized near-future scenario of less-radical digital fabrication technology in 2025 manufacturing and economics scenario.
However, on looking at Predictions for future technological development (2008), it’s obvious that my ability to forecast what the future holds is pretty poor, and strongly affected by wishful thinking.
The benefit of self-replicating 3-D printers in practice will be limited by the price of energy, whether that price is measured in a conventional way with currency or in more fundamental terms of natural resources, labor power, and capital investment. So the explosive growth of solar energy, its concomitant drop in price, and its other properties, has been a theme I’ve taken many notes on, including The economics of solar energy, The future of the human energy market (2014), Japan can achieve energy autarky via solar energy, but not much before 2027, and parts of Notes and calculations on building luxury underground arcologies for whoever wants them.
The problem of self-replication can be crudely divided into the problem of designing a cyclic fabrication system, a term I’m possibly abusing to mean a set of material-processing, part-forming, and assembly processes which individually consume one another’s outputs but collectively consume only natural materials; and the special problem of how to put together a computing system that’s fast and reliable enough to direct the cyclic fabrication system to produce the desired product, without requiring exotic materials and geometries those processes can’t themselves produce. In particular, alternatives to the very challenging processes used to fabricate modern mass-produced semiconductors would be very welcome, keeping in mind that the economics are very different.
An overview of the whole problem is in Simplified computing, down to the level of mining raw materials.
So I explored alternative digital logic technologies in mechanical computation: with Merkle gates, height fields, and thread, Nobody has yet constructed a mechanical universal digital computer, Ideas to ship in 2014, Simple state machines, An extremely simple electromechanical state machine, Steampunk spintronics: magnetoresistive relay logic?, Digital logic with lasers, induced X-ray emission, and neutron-induced fission, for femtosecond switching times?, Making a mechanical state machine via sheet cutting, Transmission line diode computation, Diode logic, Snap logic, Hall-effect Wheatstone bridges for impractical steampunk electronic logic gates, Nonlinear differential amplification, Paper foil relays, and Non-inverting logic, largely with an eye to things that could be built without million-dollar semiconductor fabs. Clanking replicators touches on this a bit too.
In another direction, though, the topic control largely talks about negative-feedback control, including speculative sensor approaches like Charge transfer servo, Starfield servo, and Servoing a V-plotter with a webcam?, as well as codesigning physical and control systems for feedback control in High-precision control of low-stiffness sytems with bounded-Q resonances; and things like Differential spiral cam cover control systems that aren’t purely digital, which could reduce the demands on the digital part of the system.
When it comes to the materials-processing side of things, I’ve done some overviews like 2016 outlook for automated fabrication and 3-D printing and much of the notes in The book written in itself. I’ve come to the conclusion that Minecraft is misleading; you start with fire, then clay. Any practical terrestrial cyclic fabrication system will probably begin with clay ceramic. So in addition to the materials category, there’s a ceramic category, and Clay fabrication objectives talks specifically about what to do for clay, and Flux deposition for 3-D printing in glass and metals and 3-D printing by flux deposition talk a bit about some processes that I think might work well. More broadly, the manufacturing category has notes on many different manufacturing processes, and digital fabrication has notes on digital fabrication processes, some existing and some speculative. Elastic metamaterials talks about workarounds for the limitations of inorganic materials at room temperature, while Plastic cutters describes a way to minimize the amount of very hard material needed if cutting is one of the processes in the CFS.
Other notes on existing or possible material-shaping processes include Hot wire saw, String cutting cardboard, Hot oil cutter, Regenerative fuel air cutting, Laser ablation of zinc or pewter for printed circuit boards, Filling hollow FDM things with other materials, Hot air ice shaping, Friction-cutting plastic, Single-point incremental forming of aluminum foil, and Sun cutter. Freeze distillation at 1 Hz is a possible material-refinement process, and Spark particulate sieve covers a possible way to make an air or water filter or mesh for grading solid powders. Cold plasma oxidation describes a process that is commonly used today for surface treatments, but which I think can also be used for some kinds of cutting and 3-D printing. And at the end of Caustics and in You can’t construct optical systems with arbitrary light transfers, but you can do some awesome shit there are some brief speculations on optical-surface fabrication.
Assembly processes like those explored in Maximal-flexibility designs for printable building blocks are useful not just for humans, but also potentially for machines, as they can produce macroscopic tight tolerances using low-precision assembly processes. “Voxel printers” is a recent marketing buzzword related to this.
So, in these areas, what in Dercuano might be an idea with big consequences, such as enabling autotrophic self-replication? Because probably Laser ablation of zinc or pewter for printed circuit boards isn’t it — I mean, even if it does work, it’s probably only an incremental improvement.
One idea in there with huge logical consequences is that the growth of solar photovoltaic energy will make energy much cheaper than it’s ever been. XXX I should probably break this out into its own section because it’s not about self-replication.
The family of 3-D printing processes described in 3-D printing by flux deposition is applicable to many areas and should extend the range of additive 3-D printing significantly. By my count, at present, it discusses some 27 candidate combinations of materials; I have confidence that at least some of them should work. If they are tried soon, and work, that could be a significant advance; presumably if nobody tries them until 2152 it will be a different story.
Any of the optics-fabrication processes described in Jello printing, Caustics, You can’t construct optical systems with arbitrary light transfers, but you can do some awesome shit, and Flux deposition for 3-D printing in glass and metals would be a substantial advance over existing methods if they work, and this would have significant consequences for achievable optics, entirely apart from self-replication. XXX then it should be a separate section too
If one of the numerous alternatives to semiconductor logic mentioned above works reliably, can work at at least a MHz or so, and can be fabricated under less demanding conditions, that would also be big, if true — again, if tried soon enough. Again, there are enough of them that it’s almost guaranteed that some of them will work.
The sensors category right now consists of five big ideas.
Starfield servo outlines a way to make some simple physical objects and less-simple algorithms that would enable a cheap webcam to become a remote multiple-degree-of-freedom sensor with, in some dimensions, submicron resolution over a range of a few meters. If it works, and I think it will.
Compressed sensing microscope describes the same technique applied to light microscopy, where it should enable subwavelength near-field imaging without lenses.
Measuring submicron displacements by pitch bending a slide guitar outlines a totally different way to measure submicron displacements over a range of a few meters with inexpensive equipment — electric-guitar pickups, this time, rather than webcams.
The Tinkerer’s Tricorder outlines a variety of hacks to build an inexpensive LCR meter similar to the popular M328.
Ghettobotics: making robots out of trash (and category ghettobotics) explores how to build
a self-sustaining industrial economy that consumes nothing but discarded electronics and other trash and produces, with a minimal amount of human effort, useful robots.
It’s sort of Self Replication Lite™.
The archival category covers lots of possible ways to archive the humans’ knowledge to keep it from being lost, at many levels of the stack: physical substrates for information, ways of mass-producing the physical substrates to reduce chances they will all be destroyed, file-format compatibility, and archival virtual machines to guarantee file-format compatibility.
XXX