book_chapter/post_scarcity.txt

The below fiction is set in the near future. It describes how a community infused with advanced maker tools might function on a daily basis. Most of the technology need to support this scenario does not yet exist, but research has been started. The references are to those existing technologies, to help you assess how close we are to realizing this vision. Whether it will be a decade, a century, or never, is up to us.

Jack and Jill live in a house with their two teenage children, Johnny and Joanie. At Jack and Jill's wedding, the guests brought food to eat, some original poems and even a song composed for the occasion. They did not bring conventional wedding presents since Jack and Jill could make all their silverware, plates, [I.Materialize 2017] and wooden salad bowls [3dPrintingFromScratch 2017] on their 3D printer.

We begin our “day in the life” with Jill getting out of bed. “You know” she says to Jack, “my pillowcase is getting pretty worn out.” Jack replies “I’m going down to the recycling center this morning to work on a new signaling system Joe has designed.” Jack doesn’t have a job, so he has time for such new fashioned “barn raisings”, especially for projects as important as the recycling center.

Jack takes the old pillow case to the recycling center. You can recycle glass and aluminum there, but those quantities are much smaller than during scarcity, because beverages are made at home and don’t need “carry away” containers. Plastic is a more common item to recycle. Failed prints and old toys make up much of it. Most people have small plastic recyclers in their homes, a la [Filabot 2017], but the center maintains one capable of recycling plastic. It’s 3 feet long. 2 feet wide and 1 foot deep.

The post scarcity society has a new perspective on recycling. First, it understands that everything that anyone ever thought of throwing out is potentially useful. This accounts for the inefficient clutter of scarcity societies. Next, knowing that you can print something when you need it helps you get rid of those things you “think you might need some day”. Third, due to rapid innovation and free access to such designs, by the time you might need something that you had considered saving way-back-when, there’s a good chance that an improved design will be available by the time you need that not-needed-now something.

Jack throws the pillow case in the hopper. The recycler takes apart the pillow case and makes “new” thread out of it, winding it onto large spools. Anyone can come to the recycling center and pick up these spools. As it turns out, houses have roughly a constant amount of textiles in them. Clothes, sheets, blankets, tablecloths, towels, curtains, upholstery and rugs all get recycled.

Joe tells Jack about his new invention. Joe maintains the “threads” recycling center but doesn’t want to be there all the time. He does take pride in it having a 99% up time. But that means he or his assistant need to be notified as soon as there’s a problem. The new button that Jack is helping him install automatically calls him, and if he doesn’t answer, calls his assistant. If he doesn’t answer, it allows the caller to record a message about a problem at the recycling center. The new switch required a bit of wiring [Bullis 2015] and an old cell phone. The cell phone, like all cell phones in the community, were made on printers [Google 2017 Ara].

They have no “service plan” or monthly bills. The phones communicate with each other, forwarding communications appropriately via a mesh network [Metz 2014]. The recycling center and people’s homes are powered by solar cells that they print [Milsaps 2014]. Water is collected off of roofs (or even the air) and filtered with printed collectors and filters [Simon 2015b] or even a solar powered “still” [Simon 2014a]. Thus there are no water bills. Sewer “blackwater” is not created. Composting toilets a la [Seaparett 2017] don’t use water and make it easy to safely handle human waste. Greywater gardens or recycling, or miserly appliances like this washing machine [Xeros 2017], handle the other waste-water. There are no sewer bills, or pipes to maintain.

After installing the new switch, Jack selects a spool of thread to make a new pillow case from. The recycling center supplies 6 different diameters of cotton and nylon thread, in near-white and near-black. Jack picks up a half pound cotton near-white spool and brings it home to his knitting machine [Salomone 2014]. He takes a picture of the matching pillowcase and sends the color to the dye dispenser, picks the design from “in-house items” and lets the knitter create. It’s ironic that weaving started the industrial revolution but textiles have been one of the more difficult products to “print”. More complex textiles need an automated sewing machine such as [Softwear 2017] and [Sewbo 2017].

Once home, Jack makes lunch for himself by picking a salad from his aeroponic garden [OpenAg 2017], and nets a fish from his aquaponic pond [Tilapia Vita 2017]. The kids prefer drinking lunch a la [Soylent 2017] whose powder comes partially from their algae microfarm. (Under the right conditions, algae can double its biomass in 24 hours. It supplies protein, carbohydrates, and oils. The oils can also be used to make plastic that can be printed into any shape. Plants can help making additional raw materials [Tampi 2015].

Johnny is filling out applications for college. There’s no test scores to report, (his high school didn't give grades or standardized tests, and college doesn't require them.) only a “portfolio” of things he’s made. Johnny is applying to the nearby “Maker U”. A degree from Maker U isn’t, from a capitalist perspective, economically significant. But there is some social status and just plain self-sufficient practicality to be gained. Plus for makers like Johnny, it’ll be fun. Everyone’s major is “making” with required courses including re-engineering designs for local raw materials [Makerbot 2017]. Designs now come in “flavors” depending on what’s readily available in your region.

Johnny’s minor will be in generating electricity [Molitch 2014]. He cut his teeth on an “erector set” for 3D printers and CNC machines [Uberblox 2017]. His portfolio contains a wind turbine he printed last month [Simon 2015d]. Even though it is nearby, Johnny intends to live on campus. (Kids still want to get away from their parents!) There’s no tuition or fees and it’s not tax-payer supported. It is self-sufficient. The Maker campuses build their own buildings using large 3D cement printers and large format “subtractive” technologies [BuildYourCNC 2017]. Another style uses smart lego-block like components that contain structure, insulation, wiring and plumbing [Simon 2016]. Food is grown in larger-than-home sized hydroponic units [Freightfarms 2017]

Health care is mostly provided on-site via easy to use “personal” sensors [Qualcomm 2016] and on-line physicians. The optical department determines eyeglass prescriptions using [Eyenetra 2017] then prints the glasses on the spot [Luxexel 2017] Some body parts can even be printed, including bones [Milkert 2015].

The professors live there just like the students do. They get no salary, but, like the students, have comfortable living quarters, all the food they can eat, and plenty of eager students to teach how to build things. There are some lectures, but many more hands-on activities and interactive discussions than universities from the Industrial era.

Johnny’s sister Joanie is already enrolled in college but lives at home. She takes classes on the Internet [Edx 2017]. Her concentration area is mental health, so her classes contain lots of video of patients. Twice a month, she works a weekend at a clinic in the big city. There’s no salary, but it does go on her resume. You need a certificate and a resume to get even salary-less jobs in the prestigious mental health care field. Lawyers don’t exist, but doctors do. Unlike the old days, doctors don’t waste time filling out insurance forms. You walk into a clinic and get fixed. ID is required just to look up your medical record, not for payment.

Jill accidentally drops her running hair dryer into a sink full of water. Whoops, time for a new hair dryer. She goes to [Makerbot 2017]. Most of the content of the Internet is written by people that just like to write and give it away. Same turns out to be true for 3D designs. It is just some people’s thing to design hair dryers, as it turns out. She reads a few reviews, and selects a model that is more energy-efficient than the one she busted. Jill downloads the design.

The original design is white, but Jill’s favorite color is baby blue. She customizes it to her liking, something not easily done without your own printer. Heck, it needs a little electric fan motor that her printer can’t make. Turns out there’s a motor specialist in the next town over. Might he accept a scarf Jill recently designed? His wife’s birthday is next week. “As long as it’s got purple in it” is his response. Jill schedules a drone for pick up at her house in 1 hour, interrupts the pillow case job, then starts the printing of the scarf.

Model airplane building interest hasn’t faded over the years, it just employs 3D printing now [Ulanoff 2015]. When the drone arrives, she plugs it into the batteries that have been printed to hold charge from the solar panels [Krassenstein 2014] , then loads in the scarf, and schedules it for take-off when it’s got enough charge to fly the 5 miles to the motor-maker’s house. In a half hour, the drone returns, drops off the motor in her “drop box” and flies off. As printers get more capable, these kinds of transactions become less necessary. Fry’s Law: printer improvement decreases trade.

The hair dryer has plastic parts and the motor, so it needs both a plastic printer and a pick-and-place machine [Buzz 2015]. Jill places the motor right next to the printer, checks that the design from the net is properly loaded, and hits “start”. This is a little more time-consuming and complex than buying a hair dryer in a store used to be. But she doesn’t have to drive to the store, doesn’t have to have a job to pay for it, or commute, or file complex tax returns. She also gets to pick the best of a thousand, instead of the best of ten.

The price of a retail product during the Industrial era averaged 4 times the costs to manufacture it. There is more “factory per product” in the Maker era due to the distributed, ubiquitous printers, but the products don’t have to be scheduled, transported, warehoused, retailed, advertised, marketed, taxed, remaindered, make a profit, or pay the graft and lobbying costs of the previous era.

That evening there’s a neighborhood government meeting. Anybody’s allowed, but just like in the past, young people tend to be interested in other things. Adults are more likely to attend, and do so more than “town meetings” since they’ve got more time sans–job, and the boring fiscal stuff is missing. Jack and Jill get on their bikes



[Lai 2011] and head on over to the house where this month’s meeting is. Though it is called a government meeting, there’s actually a lot less to govern post-scarcity.

Agenda item 1 is dealing with the teenagers that egged a resident’s garage last Halloween. The town practices “Restorative Justice” [Justice 2017]. Ron and Rollo were caught on Mrs. Magillicutty’s security cam peppering her garage with rotten eggs. They stunk and damaged the paint. Along with the victim and offenders, their family members were also attending.

Step 1 was an admission of guilt by Ron and Rollo.

Step 2, an apology by them to Mrs. Magillicutty.

Step 3, “sentencing”. It is not intended to punish the offenders so much as “restore” the loss to the victim. After 15 minutes of deliberation, there’s consensus on the boys’ sentence. They would be required to research sustainable paint, mix it up, print some brushes and rollers (or a sprayer if they deemed that appropriate) and paint the garage.

Unspoken in front of the boys, but understood by the adults, was the real reason for choosing that “sentence”. Ron had already shown an interest in Chemistry. This was an opportunity to advance the boys’ education in making something useful for others. Such a task instills pride and garners praise from the community, which hopefully will keep them out of further trouble, and give them the respect of a contributing member of society.

At next month’s meeting the boys show a brief film of their work, explain the new paint they discovered on line (that has fewer toxins than previous paints), and show off the sprayer-brush they invented to complete the job faster. They got a standing ovation.

Next up, Joe explains the new switch he and Jack installed at the threads recycling center. For such a short presentation and minor project, the applause at the end was atypically long. But the people weren’t clapping for the switch. They were clapping for Joe, who had maintained the recycling center for years. Nearly every person in the room was wearing threads that at some time had been recycled at that center. Textiles are necessary for modern life and Joe was a hero for making that life possible all over town. Many people thanked Jack at that meeting for the shirt they were wearing. For Joe, this was better than the paycheck he used to get at Amalgamated Agglomeration. He also loved answering detailed questions about thread sizes for this and dyes for that. People’s need to be listened to hasn’t decreased since scarcity was cured.

During the break, Mark passed out his latest crop, mini-mangos. By grafting a mango branch onto an apricot tree, he created a ping-pong ball sized, rapid growing, mango to die for. A neighbor with a brown thumb convinces Mark to come to his house and help him get started growing the new fruit. Over the course of the next year, Mark’s mini-mangos sweep the nation and win the farmer’s prize at the Maker Academy Awards. The annual ceremony is virtual. Even the MC uses 3D Skype to introduce nominees and tell jokes [Kelion 2013]. The equivalent of “best actor” is “best body part”. For “best picture” its “best material”. Several years ago, 3D printed cartilage won both [Lalwani 2015].

The prize for winning “best material” is making the statues for all the other prizes in your new material. Since the material is innovative, the process and printer attachments for it won’t yet be perfected, so the winner has to print out and drone-mail (dmail) them across the country. People sign up years in advance to be a refueling stop on the way, just because they like playing a part in the big event. Pieces that are more standard can be “teleported” between a scanner-printer pair [Simon 2015c].

The final agenda item of the evening is a new design from the Global Village Construction Set [Enigmatic 2016]. This group has identified the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts. Their goal is to design and facilitate the making and using of said machines.

The new design is for their Aluminum Extractor. A representative of the neighboring town gave an overview of what a facility for extracting aluminum from clay would look like. He’s proposing a joint project between the towns. Several people signed up for the meeting next week.

Jack and Jill bike home. There’s no street lights (one less infrastructure to maintain and collect taxes for) but the extra bright 3D printed quantum dot LED’s [Sullivan 2014] connected to their bike generators are more than sufficient illumination. She dons a strong and light 3D printed helmet made of carbon fiber. A protective eye shield was printed in polycarbonate.

Once home, Jill tells Jack what she’s been up to. Her long time passion is women’s rights in developing countries. Despite advances in the West, many regions of the Middle East and Africa still live in the primitive, war-causing culture of Capitalism.

One of the barriers to advancement is the inability of women to gain more wealth by having working 3D printers. The challenge is not so much the making of the parts, which can be produced by other printers, but their assembly. The instructions often mirror IKEA instruction manuals of old, characterized by blurry gray photos, ambiguous, broken-English micro-font text, and missing steps.

Jill’s contribution has been to update these instructions for the intelligent phones, that even poor women tend to have. Their 3D displays have ambient light sensors used to dynamically adjust color fidelity. The resolution is high enough that you can count the threads on the smallest of bolts. Triple clicking a part makes it “life size” so that comparison with the actual part is trivial. The latest technique is to have a double tap with a fingernail on the virtual part make the sound that would be made if you did the same thing on the physical part, allowing a user to use acoustics to sense material. The “wine glass” demo is a favorite.

Thingiverse designs have been extended to incorporate not just multiple flavors for regional raw materials, but different assembly guides as well. These represent different languages, cultures and styles. Authors, independent of the designers, can add their own manual and compete for ratings. They aren’t compensated, just like open source developers. Nonetheless, enough people (like Jill) consider it worthwhile. Studies show that high-tech manuals like Jill creates, really do boost wealth in proto-Makerism economies. It turns out that the transition away from Capitalism has just as much to do with software as hardware.

After putting on the new pillow case. Jack drifts off to sleep wondering what percentage of planets make the transition from Capitalism to Makerism. In the Earth’s case, luck was involved, but the global human characteristic of “Yankee Ingenuity” carried the day.

This chapter is not a prediction, it’s a possibility. Even if this possibility is realized, it will differ in detail. The transition from Capitalism to Makerism, if it happens at all, may not be smooth. But just how rough depends on how humanity plays its cards in the next 10 to 20 years. We hope the knowledge in this book will ease the transition.

For additional scenarios in this space, please read [Tanenbaum 2015].