Design Repositories
Next: Education
Related to Design, see also Digital Junk Yards for the Win
So far we’ve covered mostly physical services. It’s time to move to digital assets.
We’ve several discussed how it seems inevitable that product designs will follow the same trajectory as software. Over time most will be open sourced. These designs will be published on on repositories that are similar to what GitHub today is for software.
Product design repositories
Large global repositories contain instructions how to manufacture all kinds of products and chemicals. Repositories also contain machine learning models for predicting upcoming issues, finding root causes for problems and generating instructions to correct problems or even doing corrective actions automatically. Same goes for design blueprints to organise larger systems like food production, build water purification plants, waste processing, educational material and so on. Most content (designs, software, machine learning models) is open source and services are executed on crowdsourced computing resources.
These repositories may use subscription model like for music and movies now, they may be completely free or some may sell individual items, depending how compensation is organised. Probably all methods coexist, because why not. Methods like TechRank can be used to formally analyse how much value each contribution generates.
The evolution of different projects is decentralised to their contributors. People who participate into the system are granted governance tokens (voting rights) used in decision making (one option, more to follow on governance). Participation means creating content, helping others use them, lending resources or operating services. New developments are based on improvement proposals that get voted for in one of the many possible decision methods. Different project opt for different decision models that best suit them (or just because they started using some form and it is good enough).
Symbiotic Goods Repositories
Symbiotic goods are goods that gain more value the more users it has. Open-sourced designs and software are such examples. I.e. the design repositories mentioned in previous post are exactly that.
But what kind of designs these repositories could house?
Symbiotic goods enter most domains that today are at the control of private enterprises or monopolistic public organisations:
Health Opens: open machine learning models for diagnostics services, digital recipes and online courses for producing your own medicines, digital models for self-monitoring health and optimising nutrition.
Education Opens: Course contents, interactive models, educational games, simulation software.
Food Opens: Designs and online courses how to grow your own food in vertical gardens, bioreactor designs, open-source microbes for producing food like egg white or milk protein, designs and microbes for producing food directly from air, how to use food 3D printers to produce edible portions. Marketplaces for swapping seeds.
Energy opens: Designs and training to manufacture your own windmills, solar cells batteries, inverters, chargers.
Water opens. Modular purification and sanitation systems
Infra opens: Light pole designs, modular road and rail road “legos”. Designs for pop-up bridges and harbours, electric aviation field blueprints
Manufacturing Opens: Digital designs for making appliances, tools and products, houses, vehicles, how to make your 3D printers and CNC machines
Recycling opens: Instructions and designs for tool to help recycle.
Sports Opens: and online materials for making your own sports equipment like rackets, table tennis tables and nets, surf boards, small boats, etc. Models for motivating healthy lifestyles and following your path to better health.
Communications Opens: unlicensed bands and designs for communications equipment
Computing opens: open-source processors, electronics
Enterprise Management Opens: Ready to go models for starting your own DAO, enterprise, association etc. based on a wide variety of operating models.
Enterprise Operations Opens: Software for automating essential enterprise work, resource planning, hiring, marketing, billing, machine learning models for creating brands etc.
Legal Opens: A set of well-working policies expressed as automated code.
Trust Opens: Trust is created through the identity and reputation services. It is improved by personalised view into the markets and interactions with the Onion Rater.
Language Opens: Translation models between languages.
Software Opens. What GitHub is today.
Culture Opens: Films, art no longer under copyright or open-sourced. Code for generating art, music etc.
Information Opens: Common repositories for data sharing stored on decentralised infrastructure. Any non-personal data generated by the society. Personal data may be available on sand-box model or using federated learning of cohorts in a system where value generated flows back mostly to individuals who have shared their data.
All of the above are essentially digital goods change to symbiotic good opens up their potential. The fact that they are accessible digitally and decentralised world has native and global mechanisms for value capture, makes it possible to reward contributors (more later).
The nature of physical public goods will also change towards self-ownership:
Infrastructure: Self-owning logistics fleets, harbours, rail tracks, airports, warehouses, national grids etc.
Symbiotic goods generate enormous deflationary pressure as previous chargeable products and services become available either free or based on a buffet principle. Ultimately the need for national currency becomes very small but unlikely to diminish.
Programmable nature of tokens means that a lot of different governance and rewarding models can be tried such as commercial, freemium (free up to a point), inflation model, revenue share etc. All with many twists and turns. We’ve sketched a few alternatives, but we are still at the dawn of digital. Only organic development shows where how the world will settle.
Schrödinger's services
The symbiotic services and assets in repositories enable services to pop-up only when needed.
Let’s consider health for example. Anyone can download digital receipt for making the needed medicinal molecule themselves or perhaps there is nearby a re-configurable flow chemistry machinery to produce it. And they have the tools to make the needed feedstock hydrocarbons from sun, air and water as in the Unfactory segment.
When some assets are no longer needed, either the modules can be repurposed or the materials recycled.
This is Schrödinger’s health care. Facilities that emerge only when needed and disappear again when no longer needed. And this model is applicable to any service that is only periodically needed.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) is making the user interface for making your services easier than before. You can just to to a chatbot and ask what steps you need to perform to achieve whatever you need doing and it will spit out a detailed instruction set. If some part is not clear, you can ask it to explain it in more details.
And if the LLM is wired to programmatic interface, you can ask it to first tell you what to do and then ask it to perform the whole shebang on behalf of you calling interfaces (APIs) of different services.
And this work for whatever you need doing that is part of those commons.
That’s it, that’s the concept.
Co-Pilot for All Things Physical
Github co-pilot is an AI-powered software that allows you to write down in normal language what you want a program to do and it will write you code for it. Its not perfect so iterations are needed but still a great way to speed up development. It uses a chat interface making it a chatbot.
Co-pilot uses models that are trained with all the code that is hosted on GitHub (a service for storing your software code).
When all physical products and chemical processes become open sourced and stored in repositories, this allows to apply the same idea. Train machine learning (AI) models based on that and create chatbots that can generate designs for all types of physical products that do not yet exists. The product design process becomes open and new products for very specific niche needs can be fulfilled with the same price as mass produced goods (think people with relatively rare diseases or physical limitations as an example).
Next: Education
Related to Design, see also Digital Junk Yards for the Win