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In Neal Stephenson‘s The Diamond Age, a Matter Compiler (MC) is a consumer nanotechnology device that can be found in the homes of even very poor people, often in the kitchen. The MC fetches atoms and basic molecules from a Feed, analogous to today’s power network, and assembles whatever the user wishes including food and clothing.

Advances in nanotechnology will develop Matter Compilers in the next few decades: on the website of K. Eric Drexler there is a Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems and a video on Productive Nanosystems: From molecules to superproducts. The video (also on Youtube) shows the a future Matter Compiler (image above) and its internal molecular fabrication process to produce consumer goods (image below). This is a “simple” (!!!) Matter Compiler which does not use the full Drexlerian vision of self-replicating nanotechnology, described by Stephenson as a new, subversive “Seed” technology. Of course self-replicating nanotechnology, nanoscale assemblers able to produce zillions copies of themselves from raw materials in order to cooperatively complete a complex task, will be a very disruptive and subversive technology.

In a 2006 article on Globalization and Open Source Nano Economy I argued that ”some of the problems of today’s globalized world could be eliminated or reduced by developing operational worldwide molecular design and manufacturing capabilities. Instead of shipping physical objects, their detailed design specification in a “Molecular Description Language” (MDL) will be transmitted over a global data grid evolved from today’s Internet and then physically “printed” by “nano printers” at remote sites. This would allow communities wishing to remain independent to retain their autonomy”.

So I think Matter Compiling will have a huge importance, not only in scientific and technological terms, but also and especially in social and political terms. In fact, I like the concept so much because a) it’s cool, and b) it will facilitate the fragmentation of today’s world into basically autonomous local communities, each with the capacity to prosper and self-defend, and cooperating with other communities by choice instead of force. In such a world everyone would be free to join a community of like-minded people to pursue her own interests and favorite lifestyle. This is, I believe, a highly desirable outcome.

In this follow-up article I wish to focus on current related developments in future consumer technology, things happening here and now that will take us closer to the Diamond Age of Matter Compiling. Fabbing, an open source version of industrial rapid prototyping and 3D printing technologies, is building a huge momentum and will change things.

One of the best online sources of information on nanotechnology is the website of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. On the CRN blog CRN analysts have often written about today’s poor man’s primitive baby steps toward matter compiling. Positive Expectations, one of their recent professional-quality scenarios of a near-future world, is a roadmap: ”2008: ¡Fabbers Libre!  When the first “late beta” version of RepRap -the “replicating rapid-prototyper"- is released in early 2008, critics have a field day. It’s slow. It’s clumsy-looking. It can’t actually replicate itself without adding a few key commercial parts. But where critics see an ugly duckling, design students, DIY hackers, and open source enthusiasts see a swan-in-the-making. By the summer, dozens of novel fabber projects emerge (some forked from RepRap, but most based on original designs), and by the fall, some have actually produced devices that an adventurous home user could play with. Forward-looking strategists at mega-retailers and mass manufacturers feel a distinct chill run up their collective spine. The open fabber era had begun, and through the end of the decade, free and open source software hackers around the world turn their attention to hardware… By the time molecular manufacturing applications do mature at the nanoscale, Openfabs are a ubiquitous fact of global life. It’s not surprising, then, that the first atomically-precise devices are designed with Openfab-standard interconnects for integration into the existing open world standard for human-scale production infrastructures”.

Not Drexlerian replicant assemblers and molecular manufacturing yet, but just wait one or two decades.

And in the alternative scenario Presidential Commission on Molecular Manufacturing: Although these home fabbing devices were by no means molecular manufacturing systems, they relied on similar design philosophies. This similarity was underscored late in 2010 when updated versions of Nanoengineer appeared online, allowing the nano design software to be used with most home fabbers. Two social drivers proved to be key influences over the deployment and use of fabrication (and, eventually, proto-nanomanufacturing) systems. The first was a generational schism. Many of the initial fabbing enthusiasts came from the worlds of online gaming, virtual communities, and “DIY” artisans—three cohorts with strong Gen-X and Millennial participation. The norms and expectations of these groups, especially with regards to intellectual property and collaboration, alienated many in the traditional productive industries (and their political allies). As a result, the use of fabrication and digital manufacturing technologies took on a strong “underground” character.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is a practical self-copying 3D printer - a self-replicating machine that will make plastic, ceramic, or metal parts, and is itself made from plastic parts, so it will be able to make copies of itself. You cannot go and buy (yet) a RepRap, but you can order many of the parts from a variety of suppliers and assemble one yourself by using the open source detailed DIY instructions available from the RepRap website. Another similar project is Fab@home: here the emphasis is not so much on self-replication, but rather on usability. See this page for a collection of videos showing RepRap machines in operation.

As foreseen in the first CRN scenario quoted above, RepRap has achieved self-replication of a sort in 2008: on May 29 a parent RepRap machine, made on a conventional rapid prototyper, built the first complete working child RepRap machine. The child machine made its first successful grandchild part a few minutes later. The Guardian reports: ”Earlier this month at Cheltenham’s Science Festival, Bowyer and New Zealand scientist Vik Oliver unveiled a RepRap that had the majority of its working parts “printed out” from an earlier prototype. Although the RepRap was first assembled in 2006, this was the first time a parent and child machine had appeared side by side. Technically, the RepRap is a form of rapid prototyper, the kind used by designers and engineers to streamline everything from aircraft to hairdryers, but it’s easier to think of it as a printer of three-dimensional objects. Essentially, the RepRap works like the desktop printer you might have at home, but instead of printing on paper, the RepRap makes hard copy in three dimensions out of plastic from models designed on a computer”. The Guardian has been following the evolution of RepRap technology since the beginning and the Christmas 2006 edition, with an article titled Put your feet up, Santa, the Christmas machine has arrived, was very explicit on the disruptive potential of fabbing technology: ”It has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment - and it might just put Santa out of a job too. The “self-replicating rapid prototyper”, or RepRap for short, is a machine that literally prints 3D objects from a digital design. Its creators hope that in the future it will be a must-have mod con for every home”.

Of course, it is self-replication of a sort. At this moment, not counting nuts and bolts RepRap can make 60% of its parts; the other parts are designed to be cheaply available everywhere. And of course, somebody must still assemble the parts into a working fabber (a few hours of work). But it is still self replication: as Prof. Adrian Bowyer explains in this very interesting video presentation, RepRaps will exist symbiotically with people, giving them goods in return for being helped to replicate (like flowers). Like it is often the case, here the important property of self-replication is not (yet) achieved by technology alone, but by the larger system of technology plus people. Self-replication will permit exponential growth and evolution by means of selective breeding, at a very low cost.

RepRap and Fab@home are basically similar projects, and work together to achieve early interoperability. Over the next few years the evolution of fabbing technology will produce home fabbers able to print a wide and growing range of 3D objects using a wide and growing range of materials (ceramics, wax, metals...). RepRap and Fab@home are both Open Source projects, for “noble” reasons and also for practical reasons that, in the case of RepRap, are easy to see: if you try to sell a machine that can make copies of itself, you will only sell one!

So how does one get a fabber? Two companies associated to the Fab@home project, Automated Creation Technologies and Koba Industries, ship DIY kits (think IKEA) that permit assembling a working unit in a few hours to a few days of work. Bits From Bytes sells RepRap parts and (partly) assembled working units. The RepRap Research Foundation (RRRF), established to promote research in self-replicating manufacturing systems and to distribute the results of that research freely to everybody using open-source licensing, will distribute non-profit “starter kits” at cost to any member requesting them so that those members may build the hardware needed to do their research.

The RRRF Board of Directors is chaired by the RepRap inventor Adrian Bowyer who in the background page describes the aim of the project as ”I have no need to buy a spare part for my broken vacuum cleaner when I can download one from the Web; indeed, I can download the entire vacuum cleaner. The self-copying rapid-prototyping machine will allow people to manufacture for themselves many of the things they want, including the machine that does the manufacturing”, and the resulting impact on the economy as ”Darwinian Marxism”! Bowyer thinks that parts of the Marxist analysis of the economy are basically correct, but the “solution” proposed by Marxism have caused far too much unhappiness and bloodshed, and thinks disruptive technologies like fabbing can be the basis of better solutions.

Another Board member runs a New Zealand company aptly named Diamond Age Solutions Ltd. The Diamond Age of Matter Compiling is, evidently, the planned end point of this new technology revolution. How can today’s first clumsy experiments evolve into the future over reaching technology envisaged by Stephenson? I see a powerful combination of three trends:

Trend 1: BIG government projects - Nanotechnology will, of course, continue to advance in big government, industrial and military labs with more and more funding. Only a few weeks ago research in diamond mechanosynthesis (DMS), building diamond nanostructures atom by atom using scanning probe microscopy, received a major boost with a $3 million grant from the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, awarded to Professor Philip Moriarty at the University of Nottingham for a “Digital Matter” project. This project and many related advances are covered by the Nanofactory Collaboration website. Examples of diamondoid materials are carbon nanotubes or fullerenes, several strong covalent ceramics such as silicon carbide, silicon nitride, and boron nitride, and a few very stiff ionic ceramics such as sapphire (monocrystalline aluminum oxide) that can be covalently bonded to pure covalent structures such as diamond. The Nanofactory Collaboration website has many illustrations and videos (including the Productive Nanosystems video mentioned above, made by Lizard Fire Studios), and a “vintage” (1998) video presentation of an early nanofactory conceptual design, made by E-spaces (Philippe Van Nedervelde).

From the Nanofactory Collaboration website: ”The nanofactory is a molecular manufacturing system employing controlled molecular assembly that will make possible the creation of fundamentally novel products having the intricate complexity currently found only in biological systems, but operating with greater speed, power, reliability, and, most importantly, entirely under human control. Molecular manufacturing has the potential to be extremely clean, efficient, and inexpensive. The principal output of the first commercial nanofactory will be macroscale quantities of molecularly precise diamondoid products. These products may include nanocomputers, medical nanorobots, products having diverse aerospace and defense applications, devices for cheap energy production and environmental remediation, and a cornucopia of new and improved consumer products”.

This is an example of government funded but not military “big” nanotechnology project. I am not sure I want to know too much on big defense related nanotechnology projects, I can imagine that military groups are spending a lot of money on nanotech all over the world.

Trend 2: migration to the consumer technology market - Big government projects produce important advances that, at some point, find their way to the consumer technology market. This happened, for example, in the field of Virtual Reality. The first advances in VR technology were developed for military applications like training and combat simulators, and costed a lot of money. Then they found their way to the consumer, specifically to advanced videogames for PCs and consoles. Today, the consumer technology market has taken the lead, and cheap consumer products like the Crysis video-game are better, in many respects, than dedicated systems developed for military applications. This has happened because the video-gaming market can provide more development money than a government, and much faster, and also because it is able to attract smarter and much more creative young engineers who would not be happy in a dull government research environment. I expect the same to happen in nanotechnology.

At some point, powerful nanofactories will be installed by industry and begin producing this “cornucopia of new and improved consumer products”. Private investors and the stock market will replace government agencies as the primary funding sources for new advances, and of course consumers will vote for the best products with their wallets. Stephenson’s Feed technology, a supply network of molecular materials for consumer nanofactories, operating like a gas or water supply network with dedicated pipes reaching everywhere, may also find its way to the market. But perhaps it is more likely that, at least in an initial phase, materials for nanofactories will be sold in stores.

So far, this is a standard technology development model, with the public sector providing an initial boost and the commercial sector taking the lead after a while. But I think in this case things will be made more interesting by the third trend:

Trend 3: OS-P2Pization - A relatively recent phenomenon is that important technologies are developed spontaneously by interest groups of citizens all over the world with P2P, Open Source development models that bypass both national governments and large corporations. This is, I think, one of the most promising developments of our age. The Open Source development began in the software sector (Apache, Linux, Wikipedia...) and is now penetrating other sectors as well. RepRap and Fab@home are two really excellent examples of OS hardware design and development. I think as advances in nanotechnology are developed by the public, military and commercial sectors, they will find their way to fabbing communities and to the street which, in its Gibsonian way, finds its own uses for technology. Fabbing will provide a clear evolutionary path toward Matter Compiling by showing the feasibility and convenience of “printing” physical objects from digital design specifications distributed over the Internet. The sophistication of home fabbing technology, and that of the objects and goods it permits producing, will increase until open fabbing will begin integrating nanotechnology components. At that point, the Open Source, P2P Diamond Age of Matter Compiling will begin.

Open Source development has an exponential growth pattern, very slow at the beginning until a critical mass of managers, developers and assets is achieved, but very fast after that point until it becomes so fast that no centralized development model can compete. The current evolution of virtual world technology provides an example: first, large and often classified projects funded by the public sector; then innovative commercial consumer products like Second Life based on previous advances; and eventually, Open Source projects like OpenSim and open standards.

I think the convergence of nanotechnology and OS hardware fabbing will follow this pattern. And when practical Matter Compiling is achieved, instead of shipping physical objects, their detailed design specification in a “Molecular Description Language” (MDL) will be transmitted over a global data grid evolved from today’s Internet and then physically “printed” by open nano fabbers at remote sites. The current file formats used by the fabbing community are the most likely candidates to evolve in the MDL.

An important feature of Open Nano Fabbing, or Matter Compiling, perhaps the most important, will be that it will permit reducing the power monopoly of national governments and large corporations, and give more power back to individuals, local communities, and global distributed interest groups. In my opinion this will make our planet, and tomorrow our solar system and beyond, a much better place.