Complexity Is Free

By David Hartmann

The ability to create, an ability deeply embedded into every individual on the planet, is about to be set free by a powerful new technology, 3D printing. To Jack Einarsson, the reclusive founder of a subculture aimed at revolutionizing how people create, 3D printing promises to empower mankind to solve the many challenges that civilization faces. But when 3D printing is threatened the impact is felt from Singapore to San Francisco, from Mumbai to Brussels and conflict ensues between power networks who fear the potential of 3D printing and those who wish to unleash it. Reluctantly returning to the world he’d left behind, Jack sets out to counter the governments and corporations fighting the spread of 3D printing and on the way discovers how rich the concepts and applications of 3D printing have become. A whirlwind journey through the varied perspectives of the future of 3D printing, ‘Complexity Is Free’ inspires you to imagine where 3d printing will take your world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: May 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483430362

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Hartmann

Copyright © 2015 David Hartmann.

Sendinaden

www.sendinaden.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3035-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3036-2 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 5/1/2015

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Scaled Conversions

Chapter 2: Singapore

Chapter 3: Into the War Zone

Chapter 4: Quarantine

Chapter 5: Sand Beings

Chapter 6: Artisanality

Chapter 7: Brussels to Tokyo

Chapter 8: Complexity Is Free

Chapter 9: Stockholm Syndrome

Chapter 10: Cycles

Chapter 11: Storm

Chapter 12: Yose

About the Author

Preface

The link between scenario planning and science fiction has always been strong. The best science fiction has taken readers to worlds that we could normally never have imagined, bringing together landscapes, characters, conversations, conflict, emotion and many other elements in such a way as to make alternative futures real to us.

Fiction has always been a great home for this kind of strategic foresight thinking. Many different novels tackle this in a structured and systematic way. Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Three Californias’ trilogy is an example that particularly resonates. We can apply the same scenario thinking to technologies, or social trends. Cyberpunk author William Gibson, for instance, does exactly that with his look into dystopian futures and the roles of the state and the corporation.

Technologies that have been ‘sexy’ to talk about have received the same kind of treatment. Virtual reality, recently brought back from the dead as a commercially viable technology, has had a long history of science fiction that attempts to make a world with virtual reality clear. Neil Stephenson’s ‘Snow Crash’ is definitely one of my favorites. The Oculus VR founders have also cited ‘Ready Player One’ by Ernest Cline as having been an inspiration.

I see the future as a surreal place that is timeless principally because it is all about the potential of reality. It hasn’t happened yet. And in this surreal world, as in magical realism, like in one of Haruki Murakami’s novels, reality seems normal and boring and routine and then some small change makes you realize that you’ve stepped through the looking glass, into another reality.

With this novel I hope to inspire makers to find new ways of expressing their love for 3D printing, to drive them to search for design solutions outside of the norm and to make them think about the kind of world they are creating, and what kind of world they really want to inhabit. My dream is that some day the founder of a successful 3D printing start-up will come to me and say that it was in part these stories that inspired him or her to look at a new path, to find a new direction.

I wish you happy printing,

David Hartmann

Shanghai, March 2015

Chapter 1

Scaled Conversions

The object sat in a dark room somewhere, surrounded by battleship grey concrete. It sat on the floor, its feet separated from the stone by a few millimeters of dense rubber sheet. In the silence of the room an LED blinked three times red then turned to a constant green. Electrons carrying coded messages raced along dense copper cabling, snaking into the object via ports at the base, ports that reached deep into the processors that acted as its mind. A thermistor clicked into action and sent its confirming signals to join the host of others that the mind was dealing with. In response a heating element began to hum and linked temperature sensors registered increasing heat. At precisely 232 degrees the thermistor acted to regulate the heating element, bringing it back under control and temperature remained constant. Six high precision stepper motors engaged simultaneously. Three ground down on long thin lines of polymer, feeding them into the extruders. The other three, the critically precise ones, ran through their revolutions driving the extruder. The now heated end of the extruder moved up above the object’s bed, above ground level and held itself ready, perfectly balanced, ready to pounce. End stops clicked as the extruder reached its waiting position and the object’s brain registered this calibration event as the zeroing of the overall system. The motors reengaged, first one, then the other and then the third, moving the extruder in its three dimensional cage until it held itself a fraction of a millimeter above the object’s bed. A thin strip of hot viscous plastic curled its way out of the heated end congealing where it made contact. The motors revved again, smoothly and precisely as ordered. As the extruder moved the molten plastic moved with it, blindly layering down a pattern that only the brain knew the end form of. The plastic formed a grain as it adhered to itself, layers upon layers of now cooled polymer sticking to one another, stratum adjoining stratum like decades encoded in sandstone, the digital form of sedimentary geology. First one extruder played its role, defining a form, playing by predefined rules. Then the second extruder worked its way over what had been created, a different material running through it hot. The third extruder then entered the playing field, its material once again different from the other two, its role in the pattern that they were creating was not yet clear. It drew its paths quickly and confidently. The three extruders reversed roles again, each finding its own pace, the three different materials working together but separately, different missions, different goals and different functions. The first extruder, the primary, put down a support structure finely tuned to the needs of the other two. The secondary wove an intricate network of polymer chains, a micro level game of connect the dots, blindly relying on primary’s foundation. Tertiary was more selective, more restrained. It hovered and then delicately placed its stimuli responsive fibers in pre-defined places. The layers grew and grew, the object’s bed filling up with more and more complexity of different patterns and topologies. Precisely 72 minutes later the stepper motors engaged once again in unison. The end stops sent their message of calibration. The thermistor disengaged the heating elements. The temperature sensors registered the cooling. The LED blinked three times green then went out. The object waited in darkness. It had laid its egg and now all it needed was for someone to collect it.

Jack kept his breathing steady. Hyperventilating meant more than eight breaths a minute, he thought to himself. He filled his lungs from bottom to top, capping in as much air as he could. Some part of his mind wanted to be nervous, as it always did in dives like this, but training and a positive mindset held it at bay. He fitted the low volume mask over his head and slid over the side into the water. Low clouds kept the sun out of sight above and this meant that visibility was reduced below. The first five meters of descent were tough, the rubber encased weight belt helping. His fins strained nonetheless. During the next few meters things gradually eased up. His breathing reflex well under control, Jack went down to twenty meters and held himself there, looking at the silted-up buildings that made up the hotel complex. Water was man’s primal element, thought Jack. If the body was aligned properly and connected correctly then speed with efficiency proved the point. More speed was possible, even without fins, than would be expected from the level of energy inputted. He wrapped his shoulders more and extended his spine, tunneling through the bath-warm water, relaxed, efficient, his breath even. Salt water made his body more buoyant than fresh, and the wetsuit made him even more so, but his weight belt compensated for that. Somehow gliding through the water took him back to his biological roots hundreds of thousands of years ago, or perhaps just to his gestation period, to the womb. The water’s refraction of light and that of his mask made everything larger than it was in real life. Larger, more intense, more powerful. Here, under the sea, he felt truly alive. There was no room for tension, no room for fears and mistakes in free diving. With a small smile he let all of that go, leaving it up above, letting himself get immersed in the pressure and in the neutrality.

And yet the thoughts kept creeping into his head, preventing him from experiencing the now. It wasn’t the fear of the dive, of the unknown. It was a different type of fear that filled him, he realized. Normally on the surface the fear would have been obscured by dozens of other fears and concerns, the mental cacophony that filled all our days. Down here only the true fears were left exposed. He was afraid that this life’s work and that of his team had been for nothing. He’d realized early on in his career that the world was filling up rapidly but that it was filling up with inequality. There were more and more poor and certainly a more concentrated body of rich and the distance between the two was growing. He’d believed that a new form of manufacturing could change disenfranchised consumers into entrepreneurial producers. And he’d obviously failed. He saw that now, even though friends claimed nothing could be further from the truth. Wasn’t it always like that? When something was true and clear it was well-intentioned friends who told one otherwise. He had failed his life’s work and he had failed to help deal with the big challenges that his generation had to tackle. 3D printing was what he had dreamed would change the world. Instead all he’d ended up creating was a herd of consumers who printed personalized cell phone covers.

He was in his early forties, not yet too old to make changes in life, he thought. He had followed his heart in most of the preceding years and he hadn’t compromised on the things he really believed in. Did that make him a failure? He hadn’t compromised but he hadn’t reached what he wanted either. He’d founded the sub-culture DES-TINY in order to create a community that engaged holistically with new manufacturing techniques, with 3D printing. A community that explored not only the technical sides but also the social, the political, the economic sides. It wasn’t about printing a new figurine or a new fashion item, no matter how cool. It was about being able to recreate the world around them and somehow that world had remained persistently unrecreatable. Now he isolated himself, relegated to sideshows like the hunt that he was engaged in. Emotionally meaningful but of zero impact to the wider world around him.

His mask display blinked orange.

#glider_1 perform Bayesian search in quad 3-8 … 40%…

Error *connection failed*

#glider_1 self-evaluation check

Error *connection failed*

His eyes flicked over the reboot icon in the bottom right hand corner, he blinked and the display went blank, then booted up again instantly.

Error *connection failed*

The glider had been searching on the other side of the lagoon of submerged buildings. He had three of them out there, painstakingly watching the sea floor, recognition software looking for the hotel wing in question. In a Bayesian search all known variables were entered into the database. Last known position of the object, wind direction, strength of currents, and difficulty of searching. Then the algorithm calculated a priority list of search grids, moving randomly along the spectrum of easier to find and more likely to difficult to find and unlikely. Everything was covered in silt, of course, but some things were still recognizable. When the tsunami had hit many things had been destroyed but basic structures had held up reasonably well, and when the valley had kept the water, not letting it recede, it had drowned the resort 20 meters below the surface. The buildings had been claimed by the sea, silted up, overgrown and populated by the sea life. He balanced in the water, unhurried, and called up the other two gliders. Both responded, both almost half way through their search patterns. All systems normal. In another minute he would have to go up for a breath of air.

The gliders were designed to hover in the water like birds, drawing sweeping search grids above the ocean floor, crashing upwards not downwards, surfacing automatically if damaged. They were powered by simple actuators that drove the winglets and fins and a small control unit helped them communicate with the base station and scan the ocean floor through cameras. Finding objects lost to the sea was a slow and painful process. The sea, like other parts of nature, quickly reclaimed what had been given to her. First anything organic was eaten by the sea life, by fish and crustaceans and other creatures. What was left was then quickly covered in a layer of silt, sand and debris brought there by the currents. Cheap and easily printed, the gliders were the perfect way to search for hidden treasure, or for something else that had been lost and now needed to be found.

The water currents and eddies swirling past the drowned and abandoned buildings created strange patterns, forces overlapping crazily, sometimes perfectly still, other times pulling and pushing in opposing directions. The buildings had not yet finished off-gassing, and perhaps wouldn’t for a decade or more. It happened that large bubbles were sometimes released as pressure built up and more than one diver had been overwhelmed under these conditions. Wreck diving was similar, if the wreck had been made up of a floating city whose buildings had come to rest upright, mostly intact, on the seabed, burying themselves partially in silt.

His old mentor Sadler-Croup had often talked about floating cities. He’d often talked about the future in general and what amazing things we would find there. With his wild talk, especially after a couple of whiskies, he had almost made real the utopian dreams of the thirties. Of flying cars and ubiquitous wealth and matter generators. Later when the couple of whiskies had become half a dozen he’d take off his mechanical wristwatch and lay it on the wooden bar. He’d point at it and they’d bend over it, burnished steel reflecting the poor illumination of the pub. Hands ticking away regardless of where the watch lay. A napkin wiping away a puddle of beer that threatened to overwhelm it. ‘That watch,’ he’d say. ‘That watch represents everything good about mankind’s ability to create. With this ability to create we master time, we master the world around us.’ Jack had listened in fascination in those early years and he remembered holding the watch, sitting at the bar, his head swimming with drink and ideas, reading the inscription on the back. ‘Cheers to changing the future’, it read. Well they’d definitely tried over the decades, thought Jack. They’d pushed every great idea they could think of to help pull mankind back from the cliff towards which it raced. He hung there in the water, lost in memories. A mistake, he thought, pulling himself back together, regretting the lapse of attention, the pain of old memories. They’d called it the future of manufacturing, and it had been a wasted effort. Sadler-Croup was long dead now and almost nothing more than memories remained. Nothing except that damned watch. Which was why Jack was here hanging in the water at twenty meters and searching for a lost glider that might have a clue to what he was looking for.

The remaining two gliders continued their search sweeps and he passed through one building, taking a short cut to get to where glider_1 had last reported its patrol area. Tropical fish of various sizes sped past him, mouths and eyes gaping, fleeing when necessary but more often than not approaching curiously. A moray eel looked at him from an old air-conditioning vent, mouth wide, teeth visible, too close for comfort and he rapidly backed away. Stay calm and stay alert, attention outwards, breathing steady, he repeated to himself.

The glider was nowhere to be seen. A communications malfunction and it should have surfaced or continued to patrol up and down in the search area. But this was the sea; an unpredictable enemy, and the glider could have suffered a thousand fates and been irretrievably lost.

Lost glider_1 he sent up to the yacht that formed his base of operations over the lagoon. Anchored in the center, in deep enough water, it would be in visible range of the glider if it had surfaced. Do you see it on the surface? Viktor, waiting on the boat, would now be scanning the lagoon with his binoculars and the boat’s LIDAR, laser beams bouncing off the water looking for a reflection off the glider’s polycarbonate shell. The answer took several seconds, sign that he hadn’t spotted anything. Negative. There wasn’t much point in taking a more detailed look. The swell was strong here, and undertow could well have pulled the glider out of the lagoon, or trapped it in a building that its AI had signaled it to search. Perhaps it was a sign that the goal was close, thought Jack. He pinged gliders 2 and 3 and saw that they had finished the quadrants that the neural network had assigned to them. He directed them to surface close to the yacht, and then he also swam upwards slowly, comfortable with the high CO2 levels. The little bell in his head that signaled whenever the dive had gone on for too long had not yet rung, and he remained calm and focused.

Above him rays of afternoon sun soon pierced the water and as he rose became clearer and clearer, muddied shapes coming into focus. On the surface he waited, treading water, gazing up into the sky, tracking the moving clouds until the yacht’s zodiac came alongside. Gliders 2 and 3 were already clipped to the sides and he let himself get pulled up and into the boat, fins in one hand, mask hanging around his neck. A light breeze made patterns of ripples on the surface, broken by the electric Zodiac as it moved silently towards the yacht.

We’ve lost a glider, Jack said. The bearded zodiac captain blinked. Viktor had always been taciturn, even as a child. We’ll have to print another tonight, he continued. Was there any trace of the building? asked Viktor. Jack shook his head. I’ll have another look at the same area tomorrow, alongside the new glider. Gliders 2 and 3 finished their quadrants and I guess the AI will have them search further out tomorrow. That will leave the last inner quadrant to me. Viktor nodded and as the zodiac coasted alongside the yacht he held it steady while Jack tied them up to the dinghy garage.

The yacht was a beautiful old Bavaria 56 cruiser designed by Farr and made in Germany by Bavaria Yachts during their better days. Viktor had bought it second hand off the estate of a Taiwanese restaurant magnate who had been torn apart by the mobs during the food contamination riots of ’17. The wooden deck had faded from its original bright varnish but the yacht remained a beautiful piece of engineering. With the trim and dock control system that allowed electric winches to raise and lower the sails, tack at the press of a button and monitor changes in the wind through powerful sensors, the yacht could almost steer itself. Roughly 17 meters long with a draught of 2.5 meters, the yacht was called ‘Scale Conversions’. She had taken Viktor to every continent and was his home as much as anywhere was.

They hoisted up the two remaining gliders then made their way to the main cabin, Jack drying off, Viktor booting up the printer which was built into one of the galley shelves. It whirred to life, LEDs blinking and build platform automatically calibrating. Once he was out of his wetsuit and dry, Jack poured himself a glass of whisky and pulled a small handheld device with some actuators from the cupboard and set it charging.

Viktor brought a number of glider models up onto the tablet screen. Maybe we should go for a different design? Something that’s better able to deal with the currents down there? Perhaps that glider model had too wide a wingspan to enter into the building and the AI didn’t take that into account.

Why not. In any case, the gliders should be staying at a relatively shallow depth. If the AI is sending them into buildings then there must be something more compelling down there. Jack acknowledged.

A pity we can’t ask it. grimaced Viktor. The AIs were not truly AIs, more a combination of neural networks and rule based decision systems, but interrogating them on the reasons for their decisions was always tricky and required more expertise than either of them possessed. It was enough to rely on the output of AIs. It was usually not necessary to understand how they had come up with that output.

The printer hummed as it moved over the print surface, reliable, trustworthy. Something they could leave to operate on its own until it was time to plug in the handheld device and the actuator. The glider’s geometry would be printed out in several different materials in order to account for motion. All they would have to do when it was finished was click in the control module that Jack was now charging and then test the combined system. It should be ready by the next morning.

Humming gently to himself, Viktor worked around the galley, preparing dinner, opening a bottle of wine, pouring a carafe of water and cutting bread. Jack stood at the terminal in the back of the cockpit and went through the day’s messages. He was dry already, but the day’s diving had cost energy and he shivered slightly as the temperature dropped. He tried to focus on the plans for tomorrow, the search grid, calibrating the newly printed glider, the chances of finding what he was looking for. Instead each message brought up new distractions. His sister, a journalist in burnt out Buenos Aires sending images. A legal summons asking him to testify as an expert in an intellectual property trial against the open source community. Three messages from Jennifer who still claimed she was pregnant, 11 months later.

How much longer can we stay out here? asked Viktor. If we don’t find something soon, we’ll run out of something.

And you’re getting bored, stuck in the same place for over week.

Viktor shrugged in response.

That too, probably. But I said I’d help you locate it, and we’re here now, so I don’t want to back out until we really need to. Viktor brought the plate of bouillabaisse, some bread and a glass of wine.

Distracted, Jack thanked him with a nod and started eating while continuing to scan his inbox. He glanced through the window onto the sea. The sun was setting furiously, the wind breaking the surface of the ocean in an infinity of crests and troughs and spray.

To all those who know who you are (DES-TINY blanket message);

I wish that I could be more dystopian in my outlook… but here out on the ocean (coordinates attached) diving over the site I still can’t be anything but utopian minded. Still anarchistic - don’t worry - but utopian nonetheless. Is it a contradiction in terms, a utopian anarchist? It’s easy to see our civilization as failed, as one that has created more problems than it has solved, as one that didn’t realize when the time came to fade away and instead we fought and fought and then fought each other.

I can’t see that from here. The horizon takes all that away and over dinner and a good glass of South Australian Shiraz I’m not filled with pessimism but rather with hope. Emily in Buenos Aires (you can see her latest photos here) shows the dystopian world that we all think we live in. But what about knowledge? What about birth? What about the fact that we finally have the chance to engage in world changing civilization-building activities?

I can, from here on the boat, hear the groan of some of you (Is that you Tim?). We already changed the world, you say. We destroyed the Ozone layer (although we did later rebuild it). We created climate change, global warming… where are the polar bears?

Touché.

I can’t argue with you on that. Although plenty of opportunities were created that way. Destruction is a catalyst for creation. Isn’t that what the Hindus claim? And they should know… their religion is certainly old enough.

We’re missing some pieces but all in all… we’re nearly there. I’m referring, of course, to the fact we’ve taken away the need to create with our hands, and rather have delegated this ability to a myriad of automated tools.

As George Leonard said: How can we speak of joy on this dark and suffering planet? How can we speak of anything else? We have heard enough of despair.

DES-TINY had been such an innocent group at first, thought Jack. They’d all been so damned idealistic. When he thought about it now, it