Decentralised Model in Detail- Essentials (Food, Water, Housing, Waste) & Infrastructure & Services (Communications, Computing, Education)
Next: Open source Design Repositories
Note to the distingueshed reader: I’d put health into essentials as well, but it was discussed just a few posts back.
Food, Water and Waste Handling
In addition to having energy and being able to manufacture all material goods, basic needs of humans need to be met. Many of these are naturally decentral like food production or water purification and waste handling.
The future of these topics is handled in the following topics:
Food. Some of the trends are vertical and rooftop gardens, automation and precision agriculture, synthetic meat and other produce in bioreactors
Water. Lots of products for local water purifications like reverse osmosis or micro-, nano- and ultrafiltration
Waste handling. Biowaste can be handled in anaerobic digesters, water cleaned using organic polymers locally produced as coagulants.
Housing
Construction industry is already decentralized by nature as well. As future directions we discussed
Biomimicry as source of inspiration for materials innovation
3D printing as an alternative for modular house. Also in the biomimicry article
For additional ideas you might take a look at:
https://marttiylikoski.substack.com/publish/post/138530528
Or other articles in that series.
Infrastructure
We discussed infrastructure decentralisation possibility especially in the context of informal settlements in Infrastructure in a box concept. Covers:
Roads, bridges and harbors can be built quickly from premade modular components. They could also become self-owning with right setup (coding)
Electric aviation radically lowers costs, eliminates pollution and could help smaller communities be physically connected to larger cities so that local producers have roughly same speed of delivery with the help of automated electric done fleets. Airfield in a box concept to the rescue.
Digital services are available from repositories but regularly need to be localized but the local team running the services can gain greatly if they can tap into global expert pool to mentor and sort out problems. The people in local communities are sometimes those global experts for other communities.
The biggest change to come will be that infra can own itself. This means that fleets of logistics cars, drones and pods collect payments from users and pay for maintenance and development of next gen technology via programming interfaces (APIs) controlled by software.
Communications
Some of the future communications trends include open-source HW designs (including processors), open-source software, frequency deregulation and crowdsourced deployment.
We handle communications in a previous post
In the decentralized option coverage will be built by a number of different actors.
People spend 90% of their time indoors and consume data where they are. In fact, about 80% of data is consumed indoors. Higher bands used in 5G and future generations have faster attenuation with shorter coverage. Covering indoors with outdoors base stations is not effective. This means that in office buildings it makes sense for real estate owners to do it and in residential housing for the connectivity to be part of the building. Then the network owner rents capacity to commercial operators (or provides it via some web3 concept).
https://marttiylikoski.substack.com/p/construction-vision-for-indoor-structure
In cities and relatively densely lived municipalities, it makes sense for local authority to sets up networks using street lightning poles. Lightning is provided everywhere where large number of people move about.
In rural and remote communities crowdsourced setup. Backhaul (connection to Internet) can be satellite, microwave or in some cases the community crowdfunds and builds optic connection if they are close enough to city or route of optic cables.
These two options are handled in the post on connectivity
Public side takes care of roads between cities and municipalities. Uses also to set up communications
Computing and Electronics
Printed electronics is done with conductive inks and can be used to manufacture simple electronic devices as the basic components, batteries, antennas even displays and so on are possible with it. Production can happen with bubble jet printers, with silk printing techniques or with printing plates as done when newspapers are made.
PlasticARM is one of the first attempts to make processors from plastics and it has proven that this is possible.
For more in Electronic and Computing post
The concept of making each batch of processors somehow different by using generative design (this is a passive defence against malicious actors) is on the Silicon Individualism post
Education
Education itself is largely decentralized. Teachers teach locally, helped by national guidelines and materials. Some future trends are online education for anyone at any age guided by eternally patient machine learning models that adapt the teaching style and material suitable to everyone.
Another fundamental change is the use of AI. People can use AI bots to ask what they should do in any given situation and then explain it, why it made such a suggestion. And finally, they can ask the AI bot to implement the suggestion if they like. This provides access to know-how to anyone that earlier may have been very expensive. Know-how such as legal advise or general health guidance or just mentoring in life’s difficult situations. This on top of being able to teach and explain the world around us.
For more see the previous post on topic.