Hamish,

"I don't really know where the next leap forward in this story of tech-for-the-people is coming from, but the existence of communities like yours gives me renewed hope that it is coming soon!”

Yes, me too. And hope is what we need. As Bob Dylan sings: It is not dark yet, but it is getting there. So if we can all get back to feeling a bit lighter again we can take energy away from resisting and find a good wind. As we talked about open source soft and hardware on Bricolabs, in a global way with Felipe in Brazil and Venzha in Yogjakarta in the 2000s,

I wrote about it in
https://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/notebook2_theinternetofthings.pdf
“ The term “Bricolab” was coined by the team at Coletivo Estilingue as part of the metaReciclagem or “metarecyling” idea being implemented in Brazil.25 Bricolabs is a collaborative narrative26 that can only be written in many voices, mine being only one. Three main threads of origin can be discerned: a strong Brazilian conceptual focus by Felipe Fonseca,27 Stalker and descentro.org , the realism ingrained in the Gnu/Linux hacking attitude of dyne.org, Jaromil and the expertise of Aymeric Mansoux, and the strong conceptual ethnographic focus on ways of organizing and linking to policy and research by Bronac Ferran, Matt Ratto and Patrick Humphreys.
There are over ninety people on the Bricolabs list28 and the names just mentioned are indicative of a way of thinking and practice. Says Felipe:

“Maybe Bricolabs are not meant to become an identity, but rather an open place for things to happen. Maybe Bricolabs already exist, and this name is only a way to map them”. “I think the real roots for that are before… in 1928 Oswald de Andrade published the Manifesto Antropófago - “cannibal manifesto”, posing comparing the development of Brazilian culture to the Brasindians habit of eating their enemies’ flesh once the battles were finished, in order to conquer the enemies’ strengths. From that to the Tropicália movement in the 60s and nowadays, when the few Brazilians who have internet access are among the three nations who spend more time online every week, when Brazil is among the first countries in amount of cracker attacks and - sure, when ideas such as MetaReciclagem gain ground and are developed all over the country. "

Then as I was invited to join EU IoT projects by Gerald Santucci I set up the IoT list.

I wrote about Council here:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8090451

I think, with the coming of open source AI and the opportunities there, not just the fears - it makes sense to try and grow a broad tech for people movement.

That is why I cc the IoT list to this mail to Brico. We have a call on September 23 16:00 CET: All very welcome!

RJ van Kranenburg is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86973311869?pwd=kaMTR9qLnbtaNHb3zfyokvtYkQt1WH.1

Meeting ID: 869 7331 1869
Passcode: 613930

Greetings, Rob.


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> On 12 Sep 2024, at 13:57, Rob van Kranenburg <kranenbu@???> wrote:
>
> Hamish,
>
> A fascinating thread on the Reprap-unphone.
>
> Your insight into the real costs of open source AI engines is very important.
>
> And yes I also don’t know where it is coming from, but maybe we can give it a hand :)
>
> Greetings, Rob
>
>
> ---------------------------------------
> Newsletter. Subscribe on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/build-relation/newsletter-follow?entityUrn=7206587561924771840
> Inspiring talks on #IoT and #AI
> https://www.athenas.nl/sprekers/rob-van-kranenburg/
>
>
>
>
>> On 12 Sep 2024, at 09:56, Hamish Cunningham <hamish@???> wrote:
>>
>> Rob,
>>
>>> The unphone is awesome! Can it be a platform for open source AI?
>>
>> Tnx! It came from teaching a course on IoT devices -- https://iot.unphone.net/ -- so the core is a tiny ESP32 microcontroller. It can do sensing and manage control tasks and etc. -- and is great for off grid messaging https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/unPhone/ -- but it won't run any version of the foundation models that are a key component of the new AI. Although those models have now been dramatically reduced in size to fit on consumer grade GPUs, they will likely always need multiple GBs of VRAM and huge parallel matrix computation. So the AI engines will for the foreseeable need a machine that currently costs upwards of €2.5k to run end user tasks. The good news is they have broken out of the corporate cloud and can be used to give back the technology to the people who created the necessary preconditions for its existence: every author or artist or scholar or teacher or pupil or... well, let's just shorten that to "humanity"? :)
>>
>>> I think we have a great analogy here. Bricolabs was started by the promise of open source hardware, fuelled by Adrian Bowyens REPRAP. We ‘produced’ an imaginary that kept a lot of us going in our minds as having - knowing there were similar intelligences around, in itself a great ‘result’. We did not aim for a movement.
>>> And now you are here telling us DIYAI is on us!
>>> To me, this is a similar moment.
>>> Let’s discuss how we can harness this in an imaginary and a product, based on the unphone. And a movement unsingularity :)
>>
>> I remember REPRAP! How inspiring that was! I remember James showing me it running at Access Space, which later provided the laser cutters that Paul Beech used after winning the Raspberry Pi logo competition to make the first case for that machine. Paul (and Jon Williamson) later founded a successful maker company (Pimoroni) who now make the unPhone...
>>
>> I don't really know where the next leap forward in this story of tech-for-the-people is coming from, but the existence of communities like yours gives me renewed hope that it is coming soon!
>>
>> Have a good one,
>> Hamish
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>
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