As a socialist, I spend a lot of time thinking about how our system deprives people of their natural power. The owners of private capital have a privileged position in society and non-owners must sell their labor to capital owners. Most of us are non-owners and so our system today is one in which a minority have privilege over a majority.

Note of course that this class-based analysis represents only one factor about our global society and does not represent the whole of struggle experienced by people all over the world. Gender, race, ability and more stratify our society in many ways. Today however I want to point out something I have noticed about our modern popular class-based analysis.

It is easy as a socialist to criticize many specific capital owners as abusers given their practices or to criticize all capital owners as abusers given their complicity in the whole rotten system. We often find ourselves disgusted at the anti-social actions of big corporations and have an understandable tendency to reject everything related to corporations.

I suppose I should mention that I am a "libertarian socialist", a historical term often also described by the term "anarchist". Socialism, anarchism, communism, and libertarian are all terms that have been rendered nearly useless by all manner of misuse and war and propaganda and ignorance, and yet they remain critical as the ties to the historical truths behind these movements.

As a libertarian socialist, I see the idea of a centralized government or "state" as truly unfair and abhorrent. I see the state as a tool to perpetuate the deep stratification of our society where only a minority may exercise their natural power. This aversion to the idea of a centralized state puts me at odds with many modern socialists, who having benefited from neoliberalism then go to suggest that a friendly state that regulates big corporations can adequately restore the freedom the state and corporations have so far deprived us of. I would however say that many socialists have opposed the state. I think centralized socialism is a tired idea we must strive to move past, even if we may still find some wins for the people in the short term by using the state (healthcare in the US as an example).

And this is where I get to the real issue at hand. I do believe the state is oppressive and must be dismantled. And those of us on the left who feel this way often satisfy ourselves by making memes and shitposts about how corporations are all shit and the government is too. Which is all pretty justifiable, but at times I think it causes us to miss the point.

Socialism is widely regarded as a movement for worker's freedom. And the capitalists and the state definitely are impeding worker's freedom here. But I see us so often criticize corporations that I think we forget we as anarchists will need to organize and start businesses and trade our goods with others and generally do a lot of the same shit corporations do. Production and trade are and have always been critical ideas in the socialist ideal.

Anarchism and socialism are about worker's collectives, which are essentially businesses. By demanding that we abolish the elite business leaders, we are simultaneously demanding that we all become the leaders instead. So when we levy heavy criticism on a capitalist's choices, we must remember that we too will have to take on those responsibilities when we have our own collectives.

This is not to be taken as a plea to save the poor capitalists, but a call to anarchists to recognize that we must understand the systems of production. We cannot scoff at all that is done, but we must study business too and welcome in those who have studied business and want to help grow collective power. And we must not be so afraid of production that we forget our lives depend on it. We cannot simply reject business. Worker ownership of the means of production means we are to become business owners.

We must move beyond the cries for pitchforks and begin to build the new socialist collectives that will power a more free world. We need a global network of socialist cooperatives to enable the true socialist dream. From each according to their abilities, to each according to their need. Those who are able must work to create that reality. And we've got to get to work.

I don't even know how I got there. One moment I was living my life with family and friends, and the next I was under the thumb of an authoritarian regime.

I said something that must have pissed someone off. It's all still foggy but I know I spoke my mind and was met with strange looks. I decided to keep moving, but saw strange men following me. One man with two briefcases kept "accidentally" bumping in to me, always making sure to press one of the cases to my body. I couldn't tell if it was a recording device and he clumsily got too close, some kind of electromagnetic sensor to see if I was transmitting, or some kind of bioweapon meant to infect me through the skin. I got away from him real quick, but it was clear that anyone around me could be a spook.

I moved away from the crowds, up in to a residential area. I didn't know where I was going, but I knew I was being tailed and had to get away.

Then someone came up to me that seemed different. Quietly he told me I wasn't safe. I knew it could be a trick but who else could I trust? I was still being tailed, with the spook lingering maybe 50 feet behind us wherever we went.

We walked quickly to a residential area, then rounded a corner before my new friend climbed up a hole in the roof between two structures. I quickly followed, hoping our tail wouldn't see my legs disappearing into the hiding spot. Once on the roof, we entered a window and were greeted by folks my helper seemed to know. Welcoming faces were a huge relief.

I still didn't quite understand what was going on, but it was clear I couldn't stay there. The spooks would be searching building soon, and nothing good would come to this family if I was found. We agreed to meet up later some distance from their home. It was all a daze for me so I'm not sure it was wise, but I left my pack with them as I walked out the side exit. Honestly it felt like a mistake once I'd left, but I was happy that I had nothing incriminating on me if I did get stopped. I don't know what the hell they're after but everything I've got is in that pack, and I'm sure they'd rob it all if I was picked up.

I made good distance quickly. I didn't have time to turn around and make sure no one was watching, but hopped a chain link fence as soon as I got to it and then ducked through a parking garage. It seemed like no one was on my trail.

Still nervous but a little relaxed, I walked towards some industrial buildings, always making sure to head generally away while making as many turns as I could.

The roads were all dirt, and over another chain link fence I could see a dark city in the distance. Airships larger than anything I'd seen loomed over the buildings, and I could see that they were busy doing something. Suddenly a low flying drone came at my feet so fast I had to jump over it to avoid getting hit! Then another came - a different model - ignoring me it seems but heading straight through me as if I wasn't there. I had to jump again, and got off that road quick. It seemed like the drones were using that as some kind of thoroughfare.

I didn't like being out in the open with all these robots around. It looked like I'd stumbled in to an area that has been dominated by the machines.

I ducked in to a nearby building. An industrial building with big open bays. The moment I was inside, I knew I was in the wrong place. I looked around and saw a thousand robotic machines all tending to parts on an assembly line. A drone factory. And as soon as I turned to my left, I saw a new drone flying off the line and headed straight towards me. I jumped outside and pressed my back against the wall, hoping the bot would fly out of the building and ignore me like the others.

But no. It had seen me, and came around the wall a split second after I had. I covered my face so it couldn't get a successful scan. It hovered closer and closer till the blades were almost touching my forehead. There wasn't much I could do. If this drone ID's me and alerted the spooks or more drones or anyone, I'd be overwhelmed. Then somehow its rotors stopped. It hung in the air in front of me as if gravity has been shut off. Maybe it sensed that its blades would injure me, but how did it stay aloft? I don't know, but that was my moment. I lunged up and grabbed its chassis, then swung the blades at the ground. Then I grabbed at the battery latch and tore the power pack out. Two blades remained intact but with another swing they were dashed. I didn't know if it had a spare power pack and didn't want to take any chances.

I got the hell away from that factory and ducked in to a building across the road, quietly shutting the door behind me. This building too was full of machines, but none that would harm me. It looked like storage for an old manual machine shop. You know, the kind of machines that humans operate? The machines were partially covered with tarps and collecting dust. I was terrified that something was about to come through the door, but all seemed quiet. The big machinery offered plenty of room for me to hide. Even if a sweep team would find me, I felt better knowing a single individual might miss me. And anyway, nothing seemed to be coming after me yet.

I had the drone still under my arm, so I found a quiet spot to take a look at it. It was still warm from manufacturing, and I'm hoping it didn't think to alert the network before I'd removed the battery. Some of the new drones fail right away, so perhaps the system wouldn't notice.

I took off the cover on its underbelly. There were good parts on the inside. Nav system, motor controllers, radio transcievers. No anti-gravity drive... did I imagine that? How did it stop mid air? Maybe it hadn't?

I don't really know, but I'm glad I've got the parts. They'll come in handy. For now though, I've got to catch my breath and figure out how to meet back up with my new friend. Maybe he'll have some answers.

(This is the text of an essay I read in a presentation at African Leadership University in Mauritius. Please see the video of that presentation here. For the other lectures from that trip, please see this playlist.)

When it comes to starting a business, Silicon Valley is kind of a special place. You can start a successful business anywhere in the world, but no other place has the home of Google, Apple, Facebook, Tesla, and Netflix. Startup accelerators like Y Combinator and 500 Startups seek out new and perhaps inexperienced talent and give them the money and guidance they need to serve billion dollar markets. Angel investors rich on the Silicon Valley gold rush try their hand at investment, writing $50,000 checks in the coffee shops of Palo Alto - the birthplace of the personal computer. Stanford University pushes out some of the world's most talented minds and nearby Sand Hill Road feeds them cash from billion dollar Venture Capital funds.

Silicon Valley is the place where Mark Zuckerberg - a college drop out - was given $500,000 to continue development on a website that made no money. Zuckerberg, who is the same age I am, is now worth $70 billion.

I grew up just 45 minutes from Silicon Valley in a small town in the Santa Cruz Mountains called Ben Lomond. My father was an Electrical Engineer from Lockheed Missiles and Space, whose first job out of college was developing guidance systems for rockets at Vandenberg Air Force Base. When I was two years old he was transferred to their Sunnyvale facility, and one of my earliest memories was my third birthday at a hotel in the mountain town I would call my home for almost 20 years.

Ben Lomond is a town filled with 1000 year old redwood trees that tower above you at 100 meters tall. The trees draw in so much fog and rain from the ocean that the valley I lived in is considered a temperate rainforest. When I was very young my parents separated, and I spent my childhood safe at home while my mom worked, I remember always the rainfall through the picture window. The nearby university focuses on environmental protection, and I was raised with an appreciation for our Earth and all that it provides.

When I was four years old, I told my parents I wanted to be an inventor. At age 5 I took the film winding motor from an old camera and added it to a plastic toy car - perhaps my first invention. As I got a little older my engineer father began to insist "inventor" isn't a job. And so at age 11 when I watched a show on robotics on The Learning Channel, I knew at that moment I wanted to run my own robotics company. I have been hell bent on it ever since.

When the search for college came around, I found a school close to home that had a great robotics program - Santa Clara University - and finally landed myself in Silicon Valley. I didn't know it at the time, but I'd be living in the area for 15 more years and counting.

In college I started to notice other businesses people had founded where they were able to work on their dreams. Sparkfun Electronics sold open source gadgets for hobbyists. I was amazed when, after 8 or so years in business, they shared a plot of their year over year revenue figures since their founding. They had doubled in size every year until they were doing $30m in sales annually. I've always been smart and confident in myself, and so I felt strongly that if others could do this well, so could I.

I would eventually drop out of college - I was more interested in staying home and building robots than going to class - and worked for 7 years doing Mechanical Design and manufacturing at a small engineering shop in the area.

It was during my time in that position that I really started to experiment with engineering at home on my own time. I was learning some wonderful skills at my day job and I wanted to apply them to something interesting. I started to learn electronics design at home. I spent evenings reading tutorials online and using free software to design LED lighting for my office long before you could buy LED lighting at the corner store. I learned how to read manufacturer's datasheets and turn specifications and diagrams in to functional designs. I ordered circuit boards from china and learned surface mount soldering at home.

All the while, my goal was to learn every facet of robotics. I did mechanical design at work, electronics at home, and started to dabble in more advanced software as well.

Eventually I started to put it all together. After several years doing design and manufacturing at my day job, I started to work on software projects there too. I designed a tablet computer from scratch and integrated electrical components from different vendors to make it a reality. I put together a touch panel over an LCD screen, found a single board computer I could program, designed a case for the whole system and wrote all the software for it. At home I started exploring the design of custom brushless linear motors - devices with one moving part that turn electrical energy in to linear motion. I designed the electronics, wrote software, and machined the mechanicals. I even made the electric motor winder out of an old drill motor and a beer bottle.

After 7 years at my day job job, I was itching for something new. Finally I found a famous speech from Steve Jobs - his Stanford Commencement Speech - that said roughly: If you wake up every day and you don't like what you're going to do, then go out and change it. The world is not run by special people somehow more capable than most, but regular people no smarter than you or I who found themselves at the right place and the right time. If you're not happy with your life, then don't keep doing it. Find your passion and follow it.

I knew that the job I was working at - Mechanical Engineer at an industrial tool supplier - was not my passion. I wake up every day and I see a world that could be made better with robots. I see people going to work doing things they don't want to do, and I see how we could make robots to help them.

So I quit. I had no plan and no money. It was probably a bad idea, but somehow it worked out. My employer didn't want to lose me, and we worked out a deal where I would agree to stay full time for a few more months, and then stay on one day a week for another year while receiving my full salary. Honestly I feel guilty for that - it doesn't seem like a fair deal to my boss, but it was his company and it seems he wanted me. I'm still indebted both figuratively and literally for all the help he gave me while we worked together.

But I got my chance. I wanted to form a company around the linear motors I was developing. I didn't know anything about how to run a business. People asked me what my business plan was and I said "make hardware and sell it". What I would make exactly or who I would sell it to or why they would buy it from me were questions I had no answer to and no strong motivation to answer.

I spent months designing new hardware - winding motors, writing software simulations, designing new PCBs, 3D printing housings, machining aluminum, and making calibration fixtures. I went to a trade show and set up a booth and people loved what I was trying to build.

But after pouring months in to the project, I was scarcely closer to production than I was when I began. I had a fabulous prototype, but not a product. I didn't even understand the distinction at the time.

But this is Silicon Valley - a place flooded with investment in all kinds of crazy ideas. Mobile apps were all the rage, but there exists a small faction of engineers and start ups in the area that are focused on making hardware. I regularly took my prototypes to the hardware startup meetups and was looking for any investment I could find. I made friends who had gone through Stanford Business school who tried to tell me I was asking for too much money and lacked a solid business plan. I wanted $500k investment and I was the only employee!

Eventually I would learn the hard way that the money doesn't come that easy. I had been reading Techcrunch - a valley blog focused on the goings on of investment in the tech world - and all the stories of success let me believe that anyone with an idea could find investment. But my product was complex. I had no market. And I had no team.

I was working with a friend for a little while on the project - a seasoned embedded software engineer 20 years my senior, who normally worked for rates I could never afford but enjoyed working with me enough to work for free as a business partner. I was too controlling, too overbearing. I argued with him. It stopped being fun for him, and he politely informed me he would no longer keep working with me. I rushed him because I wanted to build a product demo, but he wanted to build something reliable. I wish I had let him work. The good news is we're still friends.

Around the time I was doing all this, the Facebook movie came out. As I mentioned, Mark Zuckerberg is one of Silicon Valley's success stories, and the dramatic retelling of his story made the startup life look irresistible. This college dropout spent his evenings drinking beer and working at his computer (just like me!) and soon a Silicon Valley venture capital firm was writing him a check for $500,000.

I had no idea how far I was from where he had been, but all the stories of success from Techcrunch, the accelerator Y Combinator, and the Facebook movie combined and fed in to my fantasies that somehow through sheer will and my own brain power I could achieve similar success.

When I was a kid my mother always underscored how intelligent I am. And certainly I did well in school. In 8th grade I got first place in the county math contest and won a graphing calculator as a prize. But I never did meet people as smart as some of the founders I've come across in more recent years. I am still confident that I am smart, but I think a dose of humility could have done me well when I was younger.

Still, I was convinced I could find my success on the funding circuit in Silicon Valley. But after trying to raise funds for my robotics business for six months, I was coming up with nothing. I was running out of money and my product was plagued with serious problems. The motor didn't move well at low speeds, it would overheat, and the latest electronics design had some unknown flaw that caused boards to fail after just 5 minutes of operation. I had a complicated product that really needed an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, and a software engineer just to get it working - nevermind the fact that we had no business person to find customers and help define the product specification.

I was running out of money and had no customers. Something serious had to change. And so, never one to give up, I did what Silicon Valley calls a "pivot". I had recently added a wireless controller to the robot I was working on, and was amazed at how cheap the wireless chips were. In my own experience, adding wireless to a product was expensive and frought with difficulty. I wondered - if I threw out all the complicated mechanics of my product and just focused on an easy to use wireless board for hobbyist projects, would that be a simple enough product for me to design myself?

It was worth a try.

I spent the next six months designing prototypes - software, hardware, and tech demos. My girlfriend joined in with me and started writing marketing copy, designing an awesome website, and emailing media contacts who would publicize us when we were ready - we had decided to launch our product on Kickstarter.

It was a very busy time. I barely slept. I lost 20 pounds. I got in a fight with my father after he declined my request to borrow money. I found three friends who would loan me money - to the tune of $10,000 - to keep me going when I had totally run out of cash.

A week before the launch, I still didn't have a good plan for pricing, so I made it up. I knew I wanted the main board to be $20 - even though the final boards weren't designed so I couldn't get quotes. I guessed on prices for all of the accessories too. The project needed a funding goal - the amount that backers have to pledge before you'll get any money. That's a tricky one - if the amount is too low, you can get too little funding to actually do the work you're planning. Set the funding goal too high and it will be too difficult to get the money you need - and many people who see a high limit won't even pledge because they don't think it's worth it! I made up the number - $80,000.

We knew we wanted to offer accessories for the product, so I came up with a few ideas and put them down. We came up with 5-10 different kits people could buy with all this stuff. We had pricing, marketing materials, prototypes, a cool video we had produced with a great video producer, and media contacts at the ready.

Finally, launch came. Thanks to the work of my girlfriend and business partner at the time, we had amazing media coverage on the first day. That Silicon Valley blog I mentioned before - techcrunch? - they had an article on our campaign on the first day. Along with Hackaday, QZ, and Hacker News. We did a reddit AMA. She even got me an interview for a California radio station! We blew past the $80,000 funding goal in just 8 days, and by the end of the campaign in September 2013, we had raised $150,000 from 1600 backers. This little wireless board sold 4000 units in just 30 days.

This is a day many of us who tinker find ourselves dreaming of. We love to make things and we dream of one day making something that give us overflowing bank accounts and acclaim from our peers. And with the help of some dedicated friends, I found myself in just that position. And I felt sick to my stomach.

We'd been working like crazy for months, and with the closing of our campaign our fate was sealed - we'd made a lot of promises and now we had to deliver. I had promised delivery in six months. But what did I have? I had prototypes. The plan was to redesign the hardware before delivery to use an upgraded processor, a better radio, and a slick design.

It would take 18 months before the first final hardware was ordered, by which time I had almost completely run out of money. I had just enough cash to order 1000 units with no accessories and get them shipped out to the backers. I could prove to the world that the product existed, but 3/4 of my customers would have to wait.

By this time I was drinking pretty heavily every night and smoking a lot of weed. As the clock ticked and my cash got closer to zero, I had no idea what I was going to do. I'd only every had one job in silicon valley and I had quit it to start a company that didn't work out, only to pivot, run out of money, and then start another company that was going nowhere. I worked as hard as I could but the stress was killing me. My girlfriend, who had started the company with me, had long since stopped being my business partner. I couldn't afford to pay for her living and we could never figure out how to work together after the campaign ended. I had been so stressed I stopped being a good romantic partner to her, and eventually she told me she was leaving me. She'd been loaning me rent for six months, I never wanted to leave the house, and I was a wreck every day. It hurt more than I can describe, but I don't blame her.

I found myself with no money, no girlfriend, and no place to go. That was and still is the lowest place I ever got in life.

But at the same time, I had been looking for work. On a Thursday evening I went to a local robotics meet up and met someone who ran his own robotics company. They were hiring, and I managed to get an interview the following day. I told him I could only work three days a week - I had a business to run and I needed to figure out how to fund it. Amazingly, he offered to give me a loan to help with that if I would work full time. And so as we walked around the neighborhood near the garage his company started in, he agreed to loan me $55k in addition to a decent salary if I would start work immediately. I thought about it over the weekend, and then reported to work Monday morning. Within a week he'd written me a check.

Retelling this story now has me realizing that perhaps there is more magic in Silicon Valley than I have given it credit for. I was in a very low place, and that offer helped keep my dream alive when I thought it was over.

It was now two nearly years after my Kickstarter campaign had launched. I had a big lump of cash again and a job to pay my bills. I discovered that the $55k loan wasn't enough, and convinced my mother to co-sign on another $18k loan which she had borrowed against her home. I was finally able to order all the hardware I needed to close out the campaign - and between the back rent I owed my ex and the two loans, I was $85k in debt.

The change in my life was significant. I had to move out of the apartment I had been living in for two years - it was more my ex's place than mine. I was no longer working from home either - I had to show up to work every day. I was working as a software engineer, and while I'd been writing software for 15 years by then, I'd never written a lot of it. I quit drinking alcohol and I quit smoking weed. I started riding my road bike and losing weight. I focused on my new job and on my personal health. I didn't do a lot of work for my business - we called it Flutter Wireless - for six months or so. Around October 2015, I transferred $61,000 to a bank account in Shenzhen China. I'd gotten quotes from my manufacturer and was finally ready to order the big batch. I waited months for product to arrive. The accessories came first, since they were easiest to make. But finally by March, huge boxes began to show up at my door. Thousands of units of hardware were finally in hand. It was an incredible feeling!

Suddenly I had a new problem - I'd have to ship all of this stuff! When I ordered the first 1000 units, the manufacturer handled all the shipping. But when the new order came around the manufacturer said they no longer offer shipping services. I'd been working on getting ready for shipment for two and a half years, but it took so long I almost never imagined it would happen. I certainly wasn't prepared. But I did some research, found some nice shipping boxes (which were more expensive than I'd like, I should add) and got ready to ship out the first new orders.

But then I discovered a problem. A big problem.

Flutter Wireless sells wireless boards - little programmable Arduino like boards with wireless radios on them. You can program the boards to talk to each other, so if you wanted to add sensors to your garden or make a remote control robot - Flutter would have you covered.

Only I noticed that a bunch of the boards wouldn't talk to each other. Normally in any Flutter network you have one Master coordinator device that sets everything up, and then a bunch of slave devices that all synchronize with the master. But I found that I had a bunch of boards that would never synchronize to the master! It should be a pretty simple process - program one board as a master. Program another as a slave. Power on the master and the slave, and within two seconds the light on the slave flashes green to let you know it's connected.

Well I had a bunch of boards that would never connect. The light flashed blue and red to tell me it wasn't connected. I started digging in to my software to figure out why this had happened. Eventually I discovered that different boards had different frequency offsets. Each board has a digital radio chip on it that sends and receives wireless signals. But wireless communications uses different frequencies to do different things and if two devices want to talk to each other they need to be using the same frequencies. On each board is a little device called a crystal that creates electrical vibrations at a very exact frequency. The software tells the radio chip what frequency to use and the radio chip uses the crystal as a reference to make sure the frequency is right.

But there's no such thing as a perfect crystal. The way they're manufactured determines how accurate they are. Cheaper crystals are less accurate than more expensive ones, as you'd expect. That's why the bill of materials for Flutter specifies a good quality crystal from a good manufacturer. We list one exact part number from one manufacturer as the part you're supposed to use. And after thorough inspection of my boards, I found that the manufacturer did not use the part I specified, but something else. I emailed pictures of the crystals to the real chip manufacturer and they confirmed - many of the crystals were fake clones and others were simply parts from a different manufacturer. I emailed the other manufacturer and they couldn't confirm the accuracy of the crystals I had.

Flutter communicates using 20 kilohertz wide channels, and some of the crystals had 40 kilohertz of error. When two devices with bad crystals tried to talk, they'd be ever so slightly off - ultimately leaving them on the wrong frequency and totally unable to talk to each other.

It would take months to come up with a solution. We found that the errors in frequency did not change with time or temperature - the differences between units were up to manufacturing differences but whatever error they had would stay that way. There's also an onboard memory on each chip. I worked with a local wireless expert - Earl McCune - who had graciously been helping me on the tough parts of this project for quite some time. He had a super accurate wireless transmitter that we could use to calibrate my boards. So I took five radios and measured the error for each one. Then I programmed them to shift their frequencies just a little - so if one unit was 15 kilohertz too high, it would always subtract 15 kilohertz from the commanded signal.

Then I took my five adjusted boards home, and wrote software that would allow someone to take a box of hundreds of boards and quickly calibrate each unit with the same kind of offset. My chinese manufacturer had a local employee who lived in a nearby town, so I took my 3000 boards to her house, set her up with a computer and the calibration program, and she calibrated all 3000 units for me over a period of weeks.

FINALLY I was had the hardware I'd been working towards. It was now three years since the original campaign. The hardware worked, I just had to ship it.

I would eventually learn that shipping hardware is a pain too. I had about 1000 packages to ship, but the customers had all given me their addresses years before. The software I used to track customers was designed to take their address once, but I now needed them to update their addresses. I had no way of knowing who had done so and who hadn't, so I finally ended up manually emailing them to confirm addresses. I had given the customers a lot of kit options, and then to collect more money I had also given them the option to add in extras. This meant that while about 200 of the orders were the same, most orders had unique options and so had to be stuffed individually.

I hadn't planned appropriately for shipping, and doing it myself was slow. I found that I could move maybe 20 packages a weekend, but it was slow constant work and I hated it. It would take a year of that work every weekend to ship everything.

Eventually I found a local shipping company that would mail out my product. They sent the first shipment around July of 2017, and they've now shipped hundreds of packages. I still have a few hundred more, but I can get 100 shipments set up in two weekends and then have a few weeks free to work on other parts of the businesses before they need more shipments again.

Recently I've started working on other improvements to the product. I added an important feature to the wireless protocol, and I translated the design files from an old design program to a newer open source program I now like to work in. I started working on this product over five years ago, and I'm still not done shipping product to the original backers. It has cost me almost $100,000 of my own money to do this, and I'm still paying off the debt. I had fantasies of investors swooping in with big paychecks so I could work out of a house in Palo Alto with a pool and a barbecue. Instead I found myself drinking to handle the stress of my funds running out.

But fantasies aside, I had another more concrete goal. I didn't have any idea how to run a business, and I badly wanted to learn. I've wanted to start my own robotics company since I was 11 years old, and I still haven't done it. But I have run a successful Kickstarter campaign and raised $150,000 online. I have designed a really nice wireless board that works with Arduino software and has over 1 kilometer range. I started my own open source business and had over $80,000 worth of hardware manufactured in china. I learned the hard way that you need to be careful with your vendors or they'll substitute a critical part for something out of spec. I learned that you have to test your product as soon as it arrives, and not two months later.

I've also learned how much work it all is. I no longer want to sell 10 different kits with all kinds of add ons. I will never again make up my pricing and I will never price things that low. Remember the $20 price point I mentioned? I thought the boards would cost around $12, and I had hoped our $30 premium unit would help compensate for the low profits of the $20 units. But when all was said and done, those boards cost $19 to make. I did all that work to make no money. I'd later learn from some hardware experts that you really want to price goods like mine around 5x the cost to manufacture.

Amazingly, I'd still like to do a Kickstarter again in the future. But I won't do it with a product that isn't designed yet. I'm going to design new products and fund them myself in small batches, selling them on Amazon. If the product works and people like it, then I can consider Kickstarter. And when I do it, there won't be multiple kit options. There will be a single shipping item. I'll already have a thorough test plan in place with documentation for my vendor to follow. If I do a Kickstarter again I'll be able to take the money, send it to the vendor, get tested hardware to my door, and then send it to Amazon for fulfillment.

I lost $100,000 over five years on my first halfway successful venture. But as far as I'm concerned, it's been a success. I had no idea what was going to happen when I started, but I knew I would learn. And learn I have. The business is still going and I still have people excited to use the product. I'm slowly building a brand I believe I can use for future products. I'm considering now a new product I might be able to start selling on Amazon in maybe a year's time under the Flutter brand. It's been in the works for a long time but after all the Kickstarter hardware is shipped I'm going to rebrand Flutter Wireless to Flutter Electronics. My dream is that we'll sell robotics kits. Maybe in another five years I'll get there. When I do, I'll finally have realized the dream I've had since I was 11 - to run my own robotics company.

At a first pass, zeroeth order, I'm trying to make better 3D printed robots. I'm constantly, fanatically working on 3D printed robots. I've been in to robots since I was 11, and building things since I was 5. And now I work in Silicon Valley and have a nice career in robotics.

But when I go home, in the evenings and on weekends and even with not uncommon protest from my partners, I'm working on robots.

The goal is not just to print robots for fun. Yes, printing robots is fabulously fun. And I do want to preach and evangelize the wonders of making robots at home. When you have an idea and a month or three later you see the thing alive and moving around - expressing itself - it's extremely rewarding. But it's hard too. You find yourself dedicated and staying up till 3 or 4am before heading to work the next day. You lose sleep, and you stress and it can be hard.

I keep going because I think there are broader implications to 3D printed robots. More deeply, my goal is to enable people anywhere in the world to start up their own local manufacturing center, and I want to help those people make economically productive robots right in their shop or home. When you can manufacture something yourself, you can change it to fit your needs. The thing better serves you. The world will, I predict, by and large provide a highly centralized model for distribution of robotics technology as it develops. The Googles and the Samsungs and all the other big technology companies from all over will use their wealth to produce fantastic robots capable of hugely productive work. But they will also charge a great deal for those robots. Billions will be unable to directly benefit from these technologies. The big companies will lease their robots with license fees just cheaper than human workers, and local businesses will pay indefinitely for the machines that allow them to compete just a little better than before. The explosion of wealth promised by robots will not go to those leasing the machines, but those producing them. The global population will pay what they can for the improvements the machines provide - their lives truly will be better by many measures - but they will not own the machines to fix and change and modify as they see fit.

I see a vision for the future instead where little towns all over the world have places where local vendors are printing, assembling, upgrading, and selling robots to their local population. Instead of Samsung manufacturing a robot in asia and shipping it to a little town, bringing the profits back to Samsung's already wealthy holdings, local vendors would work hard to make robots that are just what the residents need. When the local farmer takes their hard earned savings and decides to buy a robot, the local vendor gets wealthier and becomes better able to support the farmers. The vendors in turn take their wealth to buy more food from the farmers, and in this way the robots help improve everyone's lives.

Too often we see stories of workers abused by their employers. In 2013, riots broke out in Little India, Singapore, when a bus collided with and killed a migrant worker. The local companies had been hiring these workers but paying less than they had agreed, and if a worker got injured they'd be kidnapped by the employer, forced to sign documents they were not permitted to read, and sent back to their home country with no say in the matter. The law requires that these companies pay the medical bills of the injured workers, but instead the workers were shut out and sent away. The workers had no power to negotiate - they were at the whim of their employers. They only had freedom as long as they were useful.

I dislike this treatment of people as small cogs in a giant machine. As disposable laborers to be utilized until they're worn out, and then discarded. It is inhumane. I see no reason why some people should be left in a situation where they chose the destruction of their own bodies in order to survive.

And this is something I see robots as being able to eliminate.

Right now, workers are people. And so in order to meet the needs of one group of people, another group of people has to work. And the first group wants the second group to behave like machines. Well we are not machines, we are human. Let the business people have their machines. Let them build empires.

We will take the shops they build, and the factories they create, and use those to produce technology that frees the laboring class from their toil. Machines that help farmers harvest. Machines to transport goods between towns and cities. Road and aqueduct building equipment. And when you have roads and water and a roof, then we will make machines that make high quality stoves that vent away from the kitchen so you can save your lungs. And when you have a machine that makes houses and stoves and you can breathe better we will make machines that wash your clothes for you, and cook your food for you, and we will make machines that make those machines. Instead of working outdoors where your feet hurt, you can work indoors and make improvements to the machines. Instead of working twelve hour days, you can work six. When there is a sunset, you can stop and enjoy it, because you will still eat even if you are not working constantly.

Once this is all underway, I hope to see a world where no one wants for food. The world is large and I do not believe that all of the machines that produce everything we all need can come from Asia. The machines that help the farmers can come from the builders who live in the towns where they're used. The builders can see how those machines can be improved, they can make the changes needed, and they can print upgrades as needed. When they do, they'll share the knowledge they have learned freely with everyone else on the internet. The machine builder in the local town in Bangladesh is not competing with the machine builder in a town in Kenya - they are brothers and sisters in a global network of hackers who want to see the world around them improve.

I see that the way to get food in to every mouth is not to beg the wealthy to send food to everyone. The cost would be enormous and many people would be missed. Even if we took on such an endeavor, the destruction of the environment would be accelerated by the constant flights of jumbo jets from the fields to the hungry mouths. Brussels and Beijing cannot support the world from afar, nor would everyone appreciate the effort.

Instead, we must work to share the knowledge of what we have. The robots we build in San Francisco will not be the same robots that are needed to rebuild the shattered cities in Yemen, but the insight we gain can be shared. We needn't export robots people don't need, but knowledge that can be repurposed. In this way, the people with great wealth who spend their days making robots to deliver smoothies to my desk can still help those who want to build better schools and larger farms. The wealth of the few is not mere things, but knowledge. And we can build a world that refuses to put up barriers to help others. When we learn how to make a cheaper or better robot, we can share that with others so that they too can make machines that help their people.

This will take participation the world over to accomplish. We need a global movement of engineers and builders and users who work together to build, use, improve, and share machines that make the lives of all people better. When the cities become automated and the workers are sent away, lets give those workers a new place for their skills to be used. The engineers in the wealthy places can search the world for new better ways of moving motors, sensing the world, and solving problems. And those in the small towns can work online with the engineers in the cities to try out new ideas, see what works and what doesn't, and give their own feedback on modifications. The machine builders can work to find customers and understand their needs. To take the human problem and convert that in to a plan of action for the engineers. The will to help others can drive a global population of hackers to find new and better ways to solve problems, and we can put the massive wealth of this world to the task of helping us all.

It's been about four years since I joined The Corporation. June 20, 2029 I walked through The Garden for the first time, and two weeks later I was signed up.

I'd just broken it off with "the one" for the fourth time in a row, and I needed to just GET OUT of my life.

I'd seen the posts. All the beautiful photos of Freedom in the Rockies. Videos from New Catalonia. Happy people.

Like, really happy people, not the happy people we keep being sold. NO ONE is as happy as they are on Friends. So clean. Are you kidding me? I'm a shitshow. At least, I feel like it sometimes.

But The Garden wasn't a sitcom. It wasn't "Reality TV". It was fucking REAL.

And I wanted in.

Jessie had been telling me for DAYS (this is years, in your language) about how much she wanted to check out a Corporation. These places where everyone's at peace. They are surrounded by love from PEOPLE who they can actually live with, get to know, and collaborate with. At some Corporations, they only work five hours a week! I was working sixty. And yet another "partner" who wanted to be with me "forever" decided that forever was THREE FUCKING YEARS and they were done. And I was done. Fuck, I'm still mad. Sorry... these old wounds never seem to heal, even after four years... But life is a HELL of a lot better now.

I live at Corporation Outpost 3365, aka The Garden. Hanging vines, ponds filled with aquatic life, and flowers, shrubs, and fruit trees cover the grounds. Buildings are built partially underground, with the earth from beneath them forming mounds at their sides. Each home ends up with a somewhat ground-level covered deck on top and a cool and temperate underside with living quarters. Two hundred and fifty such homes have been built so far, enough for all the Owners and Contributors.

And today is a special day - I finally bought my Ownership share! I've been a Contributor since I started - the small savings I had at the time just wasn't going to get me Ownership at any of the Corps I'd ever want to live at. Sure, you can buy in to a Corp that will work you "only" 35 hours a week, but that's day in, day out for the rest of your measly existence! Or at least as long as you're wantin' food to eat. I don't much see the point of uprooting myself to get back in to the same game somewhere else with a "little less work". The Garden has a straightforward contract: Work full time for four years and you can buy Ownership status. Some people don't. They take the money and use it to re-join the other world. And I can see why; living here is a real change. It can't be for everyone. I've heard stories of control freaks who go CRAZY because there's no one willing to be bossed around at most Corporations. The whole point was to get away from all that.

So you can work full time for pay for as long as you'd like. We need the Contributors! It helps boost our numbers because Owners are the real expense we're always trying to find new ways to fund.

Okay, I realize this is all pretty new so let me recap - The Corporation is owned by The Owners. Duh. Each Owner owns a single share. Owning a share in The Corporation grants you a pretty favorable contract, where the Corporation provides basically everything you need (as clearly defined in the addendums), as long as you remain an Owner "in good standing" who works 10 hours a week on some pretty cushy maintenance and development jobs. Meanwhile us Contributors (well, FORMER CONTRIBUTORS I should say!!) bust our asses washing floors, doing laundry, and some other less than desirable tasks. I mean, I shouldn't say it's only Contributors doing this stuff - EVERY Owner has got to pull at least six months on the job in rotation with every other Contributor, no matter how much money they've got - but anyway that's how the work is split.

And you know what? I'm taking two weeks off. Well, technically they just don't have a post for me for two weeks, but then I'm going to be "Ag Tech Level 1" - Aka I'm a rookie farm bot watcher.

The Corporation uses six vertical farms to feed the over 400 people who live at The Garden, all on site. They're maintained and improved by Owners who start off basically monitoring blinking lights - I swear it's some kind of torture - until they get familiar enough to repair them, install new ones off site, or design upgrades and mods that let us offer more shares.

Oh, yeah, I should explain shares. The Garden was started as an independent Corporation (we usually just say "The Corporation") that was originally a wholly owned subsidiary of Megacorp. The original Owners bought their shares from Megacorp at $200k apiece, and collectively The Owners control The Corporation - though Megacorp maintains veto rights on major decisions. Owners get the previously mentioned contract with The Corporation - food for life, a house, medical services, a pretty relaxing job, and full access to the grounds - which at The Garden are incredible. The Owners collectively work to expand the capacity of The Corporation, moving towards fractional splits where new shares are divided from the old ones and sold - bringing in more money. There's also an overproduction factor that is carefully controlled to balance profits from sales of excess goods on the open market and sales of new shares. Some Corporations rely almost entirely on open market support, but the ones that rely most on expansion seem to do the best.

Through the original bylaws of each Corporation it starts, Megacorp bleeds off some profits to fund the expansion of the overall network, and will use that at times to provide relief when another Corporation is having difficulty. Internally we vote on any changes to our contribution levels to Megacorp, but so far it's all been good. When New Catalonia was hit with a massive storm, we voted in just a couple of hours to ship out as much of our supplies as we could manage - and with the help from a few other partners, New Catalonia came out of it alright. We stand by our partners, and they stand by us.

Anyway - Ag Tech Level 1 - a fucking bot watcher. I won't even be allowed to TOUCH the bots if something is wrong, I've got to contact an Ag Engineer WHICH I SHOULD BE BY NOW if their stupid tests weren't wrong. I washed fucking dishes for TWO YEARS just to get the librarian job so I could study how the bots work. And they're putting me on bot watch? Ridiculous. A friend gave me his old tests and I passed them without issue. But they say "everyone starts out on bot watch" which is OBVIOUSLY BULLSHIT.

So I get two weeks off. Then I watch lights blink for five horrible weeks, and then I'll officially have their permission to pass their tests.... to get to Ag Tech Level 2. UGH sometimes I hate this place. I mean, I think I hate every place sometimes. But Ag Tech Level 2 gets to work on robots alongside an Engineer; you learn the ins and outs, take some tests, and voilà - AG ENGINEER.

I can petition to take the tests two weeks after I start Level 2, so in nine weeks that will be me. It's good too; I read the books, I know the issues. They need me. This place sold 20 memberships this year, which they thought was a big fucking deal - but I know we can do more. We're running the bots too slow, and with a few changes to the railing between adjacent farms we can better divide out the work when bots break. Rather than taking down an entire farm when a shuttle bot goes down and repairing it on the line, we can roll it off the tracks and send in back ups from other farms. Slow them all down five or ten percent instead of taking one of the six farms down and losing sixteen percent capacity. Now, sure, most bot failures don't really result in any material losses because the plants are just sitting there growing most of the time. But last month we lost an entire chain of bots RIGHT in the middle of harvest, and a whole batch of peppers had to be harvested by hand. Those workers were supposed to be erecting the new dormitory to make room for a whole load more Contributors, and instead they're climbing up ten stories of rigging to get all these damn peppers out. Insane. The original designs for the farms had them linked with rails, but the idiots in the planning committee thought that would be a waste of walking space. They laid concrete instead of steel and there's no railing between the buildings. Rip out those paths and an honestly useless fountain, throw down some steel, and I'm telling you we can work these bots harder and bleed less when they fail.

So like I said, they need me.

For now though, I'm headed to a barbecue at Main building. My friends are throwing a party for me now that I'm an Owner, and I'm treating them all to a little champagne the Corporation granted me. Janet says we're going to watch horror movies. I just wanna get high and cuddle with everyone under the stars. I did it!!

To discuss this writing, please see the companion post on reboot.love.

This is part two in a two-part post. If you want to better understand the motivations behind this post, please read Part 1: Utopia or Dystopia - Choose one

I have also launched a website to talk more about these ideas. Please visit reboot.love to join in on the discussion.

The Idea

I want to imagine something like a fantasy. A thought experiment.

Think of a big empty space in the universe with nothing in it.

Add a group of 40 people, standing on a piece of flat desert land. Add in a few buildings, a central road, and a bit of grass. Maybe it's like a town in the Western USA in the 1890's. Maybe it's in Japan and they have a waterfall too. Maybe they're in a Nordic village or a plain in Africa. Maybe it's Ohio in the 1950's and there's a milkman. Maybe they're just outside of Phoenix, Arizona in present day.

But there's a group of people who live together and they have houses and a small town. They have computers and internet access but they have no cars.

And then they have The Machine.

The Machine produces an abundance of useful goods for the community members. Community members can request a wide variety of goods from the machine and after some amount of time the machine will deposit those goods in a holding area to be retrieved by the users.

Remember, we're imagining this. It can be fun and useful to imagine things that aren't real, so we can talk about how life would be if things were different.

Here is a list of some of the things the machine can produce:

Bread
Milk
Carrots
Celery
Pancakes
Salads
Nails
Fabric
Wrenches
Pencils
Paints
Paintbrushes
Shoes
Tablet Computers
LED Lights
Batteries
Wires
Sunglasses
Headphones
Solar Panels
Doorknobs
Hoses
Wood Saws
Replacement parts for The Machine

Any many more items.

In order to operate the machine, the residents need to supply the machine with some basic resources. Water is critical. They also need to supply the machine with all of their garbage and other waste, as well as a supply of energy.

The residents use a small array of solar panels to feed the machine energy. It has large internal batteries and can operate for weeks with no power. But the solar panels keep it topped off.

They also have an underground spring to supply it with water.

They started the machine's operation by filling it with ash, soil, and plant waste from the area. Before long it was producing tools, construction supplies, and food. They used those supplies to expand the town from a small outpost to a thriving village.

The Machine supplies everything any of the residents need for survival.

The village is full of art. Many of the residents are artists. Some of the artists sell their art to people in other towns.

Some residents are programmers, and work online occasionally for income. Or they contribute to non profit software projects for free.

Some of the residents design improvements for the machine.

Plans for the machine are freely available online, and many groups of people online design improvements for the machine.

A nearby corporation constructed this machine 15 years ago, and the residents bought it with their own money. Because plans for the machine are freely available, they had several choices of manufacturers, all with slightly different options. This machine they have is the most common design variant, and there are many modifications for it available. Some compact machines do not include the components necessary to make computers or tools - those machines only produce food and cloth. Some machines have provisions to make larger items like cars, but they are much more expensive.

Let's collectively refer to this type of machine as the Machine, with a capital M. We can refer to them collectively as Machines. Other towns in the region exist and also have a Machine. In general every person in the broader geographical region has a Machine they can use to supply them with what they need.

Our imagined villagers have significant freedom. They don't have to report to work in the morning, though a few choose to. Many of them work, but it's on their own time. There is no crime, because the residents know each other, have what they need, and do not wish to steal important rare items from their community members.

There is no broader government with any power over them. They ask nothing of anyone outside their village aside from peace, and so no one but a bully can exercise power over them. But if a bully wanted to cause them problems, other villages in the region would be likely to help defend them. They have procedures for defense from physical threats, but do not expect to need them.

The Machine was created by people with a stake in the development of the Machine. At first a corporation was formed that funded the development of the Machine with sales of early prototypes of the Machine. Once functional versions of The Machine became available, other corporations better at manufacturing gained more success and the original group created a non profit foundation to continue development.

It was always envisioned as an open source project. The plan has always been to produce machines for survival that are 100% owned by the individuals who purchased them. The useful service the manufacturers provide is in the collection and assembly of all the necessary components into one functional, tested Machine. Some manufacturers also provide support services, but most Machines are pretty low maintenance.

On Constructing The Machine

So I want you to imagine that machine. I want to say a few things about it.

I believe it is possible to construct such a machine, or something functionally similar.

I believe that within 50 years a machine with at least part of that functionality is possible to construct and manufacture on a mass scale.

I am very interested in finding others who believe this and want to help make the machine a reality.

I have purchased a domain to host discussion of this machine, but have not yet started a site for it. (Edit: It's up at reboot.love.)

I have many projects and responsibilities, but over the next 20 years I would like to work with others to attempt to construct early versions of the Machine.

I will contribute my time and a portion of my income to fund the development of the machine.

I believe such a machine is critical to free mankind from exploitation.

If enough people agree with all this, we can build the Machine. No cooperation from governments or others is required.

Funding The Machine

Now I will talk a little about how I think the development of such a machine could be funded.

First, there is great wealth available in donations, grants, and other funds like this. If a group was savvy enough to research grant proposals and draw in funding of this type, a great deal of work could be accomplished.

There is also crowd funded donations. Kickstarter, Patreon, and others. Members of the development project could be funded on Patreon. If someone is already working full time for survival, Patreon can help provide a few hundred dollars a month extra to encourage talented people to keep working on the Machine in their spare time.

Certainly too, a normal business model of producing machines to sell to the public or selling the goods produced by the machine can be a way to fund development once early versions of the Machine's components become available.

I envision the machine to be made up of many smaller machines or modules. One module might grow and process hemp as a source of strong fibers for fabric and construction. This smaller Machine or module could perhaps be produced by a well funded effort in ten years time, and be used to start a viable company that earns money selling these machines.

If significant profit can be generated by producing modules for these machines, it might be possible to fund a massive scale corporation. SpaceX with a few billion dollars has been able to produce a fantastically complex rocket system. It might be true that a final Machine would cost $60 million and be the size of a building. But SpaceX has shown that this type of massive scale development is still very possible in a relatively short amount of time for even one private company.

Certainly, I am more imagining a machine that costs under $1 million, or $33k per person for 30 people to share. With a few decades of constant work on the design by a few hundred dedicated contributors, such a machine should in principle be possible to construct.

It will take many contributors to plan how this can be done. Business people, marketers, engineers, writers, machinists, fabricators, and investors will be required.

But it is something I see as worth the effort.

For now, let this writing serve as my first attempt to communicate what The Machine is. In the future I would like to put together a mixed media presentation that includes a website with artists renditions, diagrams, presentations, and other information that can more effectively, concisely, and completely convey the concept of the Machine and its development project.

Some Questions

I think we should be asking ourselves a lot of questions about The Machine. Here is a small list of questions I have.

Is it really possible to build anything like this?
What can we realistically expect a machine like this to be able to produce if it was constructed in 20 years?
What kind of a life would that afford to the residents?
How can we fund the development of such a machine?
Does it even make sense to try to do so?
What will happen if some people have The Machine and some people don't? Will that inequality create problems?
How do we expect the residents to get medical care?
Does the machine create the materials necessary for medical care?
What is the system architecture of a Machine?
What are the various modules the Machine should have?
How do they interconnect?
How do residents support the Machine?

I'm sure you have questions of your own, and I'd like to hear them as well as possible answers. For now try to think about The Machine, and contact me to let me know you're thinking about it. In time, I hope we have a place to record our discussions.

Contact Me

If you want to talk with me directly about The Machine, please email me at tlalexander@gmail.com.

See also the discussion of this post on Reddit.
And the discussion on Hacker News.

And don't forget to visit the companion website reboot.love to join in on the discussion!

Since I was 11 years old, I have wanted to run my own robotics company.

At first it just seemed like it would be a good career. Long before I ever liked coffee, I dreamed of living in a house full of custom robots that would bring me coffee (via an in-wall conveyor belt, in that case) and do all manner of other things I required. I imagined I would run a company that designed robots for people to meet their various needs. Businesses mostly, I figured, would want special little robotic gadgets to solve problems they had. I'd have a corner shop where I worked away to make things for these businesses.

Over the years, the rationale for running my own robotics company has become more specific and my goals have become more grandiose. I've realized that as an engineer and entrepreneur I have great power to make a positive impact on the world. We're at an interesting place in history. This thing called humanity has never happened before the way it is happening now. We don't strictly know what we're doing and we're making a lot of mistakes. We're throwing our own lives away to make the world worse for the generations that follow us. We're pursuing growth when growth isn't what we need. We're polluting the Earth's atmosphere, oceans, and land with all the machinations of the most powerful industrial civilization the Earth has ever seen. We're converting this rich oasis of life into a sterile dead landscape under the mistaken impression that a better life requires more stuff. Our lives are so devoted to working to make that happen that most people alive today will scarcely know what they are missing.

I believe it is possible for life on Earth to be much more comfortable, pleasant, and fun for all of the creatures that live here.

I believe it is possible to sustain a vibrant economy with everyone typically working just 6 months out of the year.

I believe that a reduction in hours worked will be a key step towards reducing our impact on the environment.

I think life is more interesting when we don't spend it all working. I think caring for others makes us all richer in a variety of material and immaterial ways.

So I'm trying to figure out how to make an impact. One thing is clear to me now: somehow a corporation will be involved. It seems like the only way to get anything done these days.

I'm trying to figure out how to run a profitable business. So far it's going well. Not so much on the profit thing, but on the learning front. I've learned not to make too many promises, to understand my budget, to keep my mental health under control, and to be very, very patient.

So right now I have a little electronics company. We've had almost 10,000 circuit boards manufactured in China, with about 20% of those having been delivered and the rest sort of being frantically packed right now. Some phenomenal people have helped me along the way, many of whom saved me from collapse when I thought I could not go on. I've also done a huge amount of the work myself, which is good because I'm certain of what I can do. I'll need to learn to collaborate more in the future, but without profits employees haven't been a big concern as of yet.

But I think I can get the hang of running an electronics company. I feel like I'm over the hump of the most painful part. It's pretty routine now. I work full time at my normal job and then work on evenings and weekends to move the company forward. It's slow but sustainable. As long as I can maintain my mental health, I can do this indefinitely. I'm working towards profitability, which I think I can achieve in the next two years. I've been doing it for three and a half years and it seems like it takes a lot of companies about 5 years to get somewhere stable, which feels right based on my trajectory.

So then the next question is: where do we go from here?

I've got lots of ideas. I'm pretty clear on the idea that I want to make as positive an impact on humanity as I can while still maintaining a happy life. I also want that impact to be as widely distributed as possible. I want my work to benefit the people in the world living on, say, less than $1 a day. For practical purposes I will also target much wealthier people as a means to fund the operation, but the ultimate goal is to make an impact on the masses of the human population of Earth in the 21st century. Say, the 3.5 billion poorest people of the Earth. Even getting the richest people in the world to work less will give the poorest a break, since working rich people consume more than rich people in leisure. But to be extremely clear: helping the rich, while it may be a worthwhile stepping stone, is not my end goal.

For now I'm trying to make my electronics company sustainable. From there I will be expanding our product offering into other electronics for robotics, all of which are open source and allow commercial re-use. People can use our electronics to design a new robot, and then go manufacture them themselves when they go in to production. By providing a complete suite of high quality electronics for robotics that can be used in production products, we will be helping speed the spread of automation in the world. I'll need to explain elsewhere, but I'm very clear that automation as a tool is an extremely good thing in general, and when the power to produce automation is widely distributed I think the wealth of the future will be widely distributed too.

So I'm designing some new electronics to make an open source robotics construction kit. I'm also developing some new concepts for using 3D printers to make a whole zoo of different robots, to show people how easy it is to build robots with modern tools. We've got a couple of key products, the Basic and the Pro, that I think we can get shipping from stock in the next year. Once that is happening, we will start releasing a few new products related to robotics. That will be some or all of the following: a motor controller board that allows high quality motion control of low cost brushless motors, a 6 cell lithium charger/balancer board that can safely manage a good sized battery system, and a high quality IMU board made to work with the whole system.

Then I've got a good 12 or more designs for different robotic vehicles that use this technology, and we'll open a section of our website that details these designs and lets people remix and share their own versions. There will be no requirement that the designs use our electronics.

Once we've made it easy for regular people to build a bunch of different robots, I think it would be interesting to turn people's attention to micro factories. The idea behind micro factories is that small businesses will want to automate to keep up with all the big companies. I think small businesses are great because they are agile and better reflect the needs of the communities they serve. The competition between small businesses and the big corporations will be what provides the push-pull advancement that we need to make the world a better place for all. There will be big corporations like Samsung and LG that produce expensive robots for big corporations, and I want Flutter to be a balancing force providing low cost automation solutions to the broad base of businesses that can't afford a $2,000 robotic arm. If you are familiar with the 3D printer landscape in 2009, I want Flutter to be to robotics what Makerbot and Reprap were to the 3D printing giants like Stratasys and 3D Systems. In the mid 2000's normal 3D printers were $30,000. Then a bunch of scrappy nerds came together and made 3D printers that cost under $1000 to build. It took a lot of love and time to make one, but slowly the whole community came together to improve the systems and today you can buy a rock solid 3D printer for $329.

I was at an event in San Francisco recently. A group called Silicon Valley Robotics put together a panel of local robotics CEO's and investors and had a great discussion about the future of robotics. One panelist from the industry said "If you can make a good robotic arm for under $10k, you'd have a lot of customers." Okay, sure, but I think we need $100 robotic arms to serve the world's poorest. We're not going to get there using the thinking that got us $30,000 arms. Ten years ago a good 3D printer was $30,000. Today they're $329. To help the world's population, we need to do that same thing with robotics.

So that's what I'm trying to do with Flutter.

Prologue and Chapter 1 published here. Additional chapters to be written.

Prologue

"What's that?" Donny asked, his soft southern accent showing through.

"New mod for R34," Jack responded as she applied some lithium grease to the crank arm. "Should stop it from getting clogged when it goes through that stream."

The place had been getting heavy rain for weeks, and new streams had cut their way through the farm's landscape. The bots didn't seem to mind, or really notice even, and kept on the same paths as usual driving straight through the new waterways. It wreaked havoc on the mechanicals. They were rated for splashes, rain, and hose down, but driving through muddy streams every day revealed the need for a few improvements in the design of the harvester's retrieval arm.

Donny looked on in silent amazement as Jack tore into the mechanical skeleton on her workbench. The bot mostly snapped together, so she didn't need to waste time reaching for tools as she pulled off the outer shell, separated the frame, and accessed the linkage that had filled with mud. In a few seconds it was free from the robot's base, and she'd snapped in the upgraded assembly.

"What if you forget something?" Donny wondered out loud as Jack re-assembled the diminutive vehicle. "There's a lot of parts there."

"Like what? A screw?" Jack asked sarcastically. "Parts in these snap-together frames are easy as hell to keep track of. We don't use screws because there's no need. This whole robot only has 43 mechanical parts, and I designed most of them. I designed this mod in my head last night before I drew it up. This robot is my baby, and there's no way in hell I'd forget how it goes together."

"But for noobs like you," Jack continued, "just study the assembly drawings."

"Oh great! Where are the assembly drawings?" Donny asked eagerly.

"I'm glad you asked Donny, I'm glad you asked," She said with a hint of amused irony in her voice. "Remember that job Manesh said we had for you?"

Donny nodded.

"We need you to create assembly drawings for the harvesters. The current drawings are about four versions behind, and Manesh says we need to be up to date when we push the big release. I just don't give a shit about assembly drawings so I'm making you do it. I'll just tear through the CAD when a new bot comes out, but apparently some people really need the drawings."

"Oh..." Donny seemed confused. "But how can I make the drawing if I don't know how it goes together?"

"I... Were you raised on an iPad?" Jack asked impatiently. "Just take one apart and figure it out. Here, you can use R27. It needs to be cleaned. Take it apart, clean all the components, and put it back together. Take video while you disassemble it so you can check where things go when you forget. Tomorrow I'll show you how to upgrade the arm with the new mod. For now I'm off to test it. You'll have this back together in the morning. I need it operational. Get started."

Jack dropped R34 on the shop floor and hit the power button. With a low hum, the system came to life. Two beeps - electronics self test passed. Then there was a slight whine followed by three beeps - motor systems on line. And then a moment later, the bot was rolling out of the shop. Once the self tests are done, the robot figures out where it is, what it can do to help, and gets to work. Jack hoped Donny would prove as useful as she followed R34 out the door.

Donny sat there staring at the vehicle in front of him. He didn't have the slightest idea how to begin, but Jack wasn't the kind of girl you want to disappoint. It was going to be a long night.

--

The smell of wet earth filled the shop as Jack returned in the morning. She clenched her coffee and made her way to the back of the shop, looking for R27. The room hummed with the sound of printers all churning out bot parts - frames, wheels, gears, motors, all being made on the spot. All the replacement parts, mods, and upgrades they needed were made right on the property in Jack's shop. She rounded the corner past the main workbench. There she discovered R27 torn to pieces, the floor littered with parts. And there was Donny, passed out on the shop cot, still wearing his video glasses.

Jack was pissed.

Chapter 1

Four years later.

The shop was humming with activity as Donny got the call. "What's up Manesh?" Donny asked through the comms system.

"V618 is stuck again. This can't keep happening." Manesh said impatiently.

"Son of a bitch. Yeah, alright, I have a plan."

Donny swapped his kicks for work boots, grabbed a coat, and walked outside. In front of the shop, Sanctuary was humming.

"Hey Donny!" a new resident shouted from a reading bench for the fourth morning in a row.

"Hey!" he returned instinctively. "I've got to remember her name," he told himself.

The shop contained most of the bot hardware and service equipment, but the tractor was still kept in an old barn on the other side of the grid.

"Fifteen million to build this place and we still keep the tractor in a 150 year old barn." he thought to himself.

Sanctuary was arranged in two overlaid patterns. A continuous outward spiraling walkway formed the main path through the property. Buildings were arranged along the path in the most logical fashion, and most of them were multipurpose structures so the whole place could be quickly reconfigured. Of course, going from one end of a spiral to the other would be maddening if you weren't looking for a leisurely stroll through markets, gardens, and dormitories. To make it more efficient, there were many pathways connecting buildings across arms, like spokes on a wagon wheel. That's the first pattern.

Jack was part of the original planning crew, and she hated the spiral idea. "Just make a grid," she told them. "Grids are easy. Planning for the bots will be simple and none of the residents will get lost."

The board wasn't going to give up on the spirals. Jack wasn't going to give up on a grid. They could have overruled her, but it seemed no one wanted to.

So overlaid on the pattern of walkways spiraling out from the center is a mostly complete grid connecting every corner of the property in a neat, direct fashion.

Donny used to love going on long walks down the spiral, especially under the stars. This day he was just happy to have the grid. V618 was one of the heavy vehicles used to transport raw harvest from the distant fields to the processing depot. Sanctuary had grown a lot since the storm, to make sure they never ran out of food again. That meant a lot more bots and a lot more responsibility. He had 100 other problems to fix that day, and he wanted to put this one to rest.

So Donny didn't take a long, casual walk that day. He went straight down the grid towards the barn. Jack was a son of a bitch at times, but she was rarely wrong. The grid between the shop and the barn took him right past the center of sanctuary, through the main gardens. It was all he could do to not think about the time he used to spend there. He just wanted to fix the issue with V618.

--

The tractor hummed when he got in. They didn't bother with keys, there was no way to steal anything. Each building knew who you were and your access was controlled by the access system. Computers, of course, strictly enforce the rules. But there weren't too many rules in Sanctuary, residents were all there together and there was a real camaraderie between them. Mostly the servers were used to turn the lights on, keep the heat right, and route messages to residents through the comms. But they also kept people off of the maintenance equipment. It wasn't always so controlled, but after a resident "seeking higher forms of consciousness" knocked a hole in the side of the library, the residents all agreed they didn't need unfettered access to the tractors.

These little decisions were hard for the community. They had formed Sanctuary to retreat from the rules of broader society. You can't say this, you can't do that. It held people back, impeded their lives. Sanctuary was seen by many as the ultimate escape from all that - a way to live life freely without control from outside the self. We've only got one chance here and people wanted to make it worthwhile. Sanctuary was part libertarian, part socialist, part utopian. It worked surprisingly well, and after eight years copies of Sanctuary were beginning to pop up all over the country.

Donny leaned back in his seat as he commanded the door to open. The barn may be 150 years old, but that doesn't mean the doors can't be automated. Nobody wants to slog through the mud to open a barn door in the rain.

The tractor's cabin was comfortable. It was enclosed so weather didn't slow down operations, and a holographic display filled the volume of the cabin. Anything could be displayed at any point inside that space. Even in a snowstorm the radar systems could map the outside world and show it to the operator. The weather was fine that day, and Donny looked forward to the long drive into the fields.

"Head to V618" Donny told the on board systems. Silently, the tractor rolled forward. It wasn't chatty like most of Sanctuary's systems. Donny was glad for that.

Outside the main complex, Sanctuary was more haphazard. Placed in an ancient river valley between two sets of rolling hills, they originally thought 100 acres would be all they needed. The main complex was in the center, straddling the river. Farms stretched out from either side. It was as beautiful as it was easy to defend. Aerial drones kept watch on the perimeter, and a defunct military satellite provided some coverage of the broader area when it was overhead. Jack had hacked the stream for that one long before Sanctuary was founded, and no one ever seemed to mind.

Donny thought about the problems he'd face in the shop that day as the tractor made its way to the outer reaches of New Sanctuary. After the storm, after all they had been through, they realized they needed more space. Three kilometers southeast through a massive redwood forest was a broad open plain, hundreds of acres in size. That was New Sanctuary.

Donny kept his head down as the old giants passed overhead. He was thinking about the repairs he'd need to make to B212 back in the shop. The interns just weren't getting it, and he didn't have anyone to help with the workload. It was stressful, but he had no choice. Sanctuary has to run and he wasn't going to let the residents down.

In the vast expanse of New Sanctuary, on the East end of the plain, V618 sat stuck in a muddy patch. A seasonal stream flooded part of New Sanctuary every year, and the massive harvest vehicles were getting bogged down in the soft clay. Most of the vehicles did alright, but V618, one of the 20 full size harvest vehicles operating on the farm, kept driving through a mud pit.

Donny got out of the cab to asses the situation. The truck-sized harvest robot sat in deep ruts, mud caked so deep on the tires they had become smooth as billiard balls. It tried to free itself by rocking back and forth, but it only dug itself in deeper. He looked at the tracks the vehicle had been carving for weeks along this path. He really needed to program in some variability to their motion. Sometimes computers are too perfect, and they make things worse.

He touched his comms unit, which patched him through the tractor back to Sanctuary proper. "Sanctuary, I need enough gravel to cover an area 20 meters by 50 meters five centimeters deep. Send six full length five by twenty planks too."

"Right away Donny." A pleasant voice said on the other end. "Fifty cubic meters of gravel and six planks coming up. It will take one full truckload. Expect arrival at your location in approximately 30 minutes."

"Thanks Lila." Donny responded. "How is everything back at base?"

"Everything's nominal" Lila replied.

"Hah, no sorry I mean how are you?" Donny continued. "How are the kids, Xeke and Syrah? How is Esh?"

"Oh, right." Lila stammered awkwardly. She forgot sometimes people just want to say hello. "Family is great, thanks. Xeke is learning Kenpo and kicking butt. Syrah is the only student who can beat him. Esh is learning the violin, which he says is calming."

"That's great to hear. But what about you?" asked Donny.

"I'm... healing. Mostly I like to stay in the call center. I've been taking everyone's shifts. My friends tell me I'm hiding from my feelings. I tell them they don't know what they're talking about, and to get me more fries."

"Well I'm glad to hear you're finding your way. Hang in there Lila, you're strong."

"Thanks. Truck will be there in 30 minutes. Good luck." Lila liked to talk to Donny about her feelings, but not too much. Still, she kept telling him, and it seemed to help her.

Now Donny had half an hour to kill. Far from the grid, New Sanctuary was peaceful. He would have a little time to himself today, and he wasn't going to waste it. Off in a far corner of New Sanctuary, Jack and Donny had started a marijuana field years earlier. The stuff was pretty popular at Sanctuary, and the main gardens were always wafting with the smell of the burned buds.

Donny was way into it for a while, but as responsibilities picked up he had to start staying mindful of his consciousness. It helped him relax, but sometimes he got too relaxed. With no one else to run the shop, he didn't partake too often anymore. Life just moved too fast these days. More recently, he'd started growing tobacco in the old field.

Hidden inside his coat was a spliff he'd made just for this kind of situation. Half tobacco and half sativa marijuana gave him a good buzz without knocking him out. He leaned against the side of the tractor, looked out over the open fields, and lit up. A ray of sunlight warmed his face as he drew his first puff. Another long day was just beginning.

These days, robots are increasingly part of the public discourse. There exists significant fear that robots will destroy the job market and leave millions destitute. Meanwhile some people believe that robots will bring about a technological utopia where no one works and all enjoy a life of leisure. Both the utopia and the dystopia are possible, but neither will come about automatically. It will be our decisions - or lack of decisions - that steer our society towards abundance or doom.

The Parable

A friend once told me the following parable:

Imagine there is a small farming society that lives isolated from the outside world. Everything they need is produced in their community. Most of the people spend their time farming, and they make just enough food to survive plus a little extra to save for bad weather.

Now imagine that a magical piece of technology appears from nowhere that significantly increases the productivity of the farmers. Suddenly they can produce 50% more food with just 5% of the labor required.

This should be great news for all the members of this society, but it depends entirely on how they share the wealth created by this new technology. A key fact here is that collectively, the group cannot be worse off for having this invention - they get more food and have to work fewer hours. If they rotate who performs the remaining labor and share the extra food just as they would have before, they will all benefit greatly. But if some individuals try to claim the benefits for themselves, others will suffer. It is entirely up to the culture of the people to decide what should happen and what is acceptable.

This is the position we find ourselves in today. We all live on this Earth together. Collectively, we're self sufficient and don't (yet) take in any resources from beyond our home world. Technology, however, doesn't appear from nowhere. It is invented by individuals of all walks of life who are working hard to survive. Nature taught humankind that we all must fight for our survival and so the inventors of new technology work hard to gain wealth from their inventions. Every person is permitted to reap the profits for themselves with the idea that this reward will encourage future innovations from which we will all benefit.

The Breaking Point

Mostly this appears to work, but automation will test the limits of such an arrangement. Over the next 20 years, jobs will be replaced by automation at a rate never before seen in human history. Low wage workers who perform highly repetitive tasks will be replaced by robots, and high wage workers who produce their value by working at a computer will be replaced by software. Lawyers, pharmacists, engineers, truck drivers, retail and fast food workers will all be replaced by automation. All those people who get extra income by driving for Uber or Lyft will have to find another job.

Now, some people don't actually believe this will happen. Computers can never think like a human, they may say. Humans are special, they claim. But the state of technology proves that humans aren't particularly special when it comes to our ability to do valuable work. Computers haven't been very creative or flexible in the past, but that's all changing. Meanwhile computers can perform the same task flawlessly millions of times per second, operate continuously on pennies of electricity, require no breaks or rest, and can be duplicated indefinitely to meet any demand. Humans have to spend decades of their lives training while a computer can accept any software and immediately run it. Self driving cars pass my office every day and machine learning is breaking decades old barriers in software, allowing computers to perform tasks better than humans in a variety of fields. There are many examples to draw from but that's not the point here. The point is simply that software and robots will in a huge number of cases be a better choice for business people than hiring humans. And that's going to have a significant impact on our society.

The way things currently work, the doom and gloomers are right. If you don't have a job, things are pretty bleak. If you JUST lost your job you may be able to find a new one, but if you are unemployed long enough it becomes even harder to recover. And once a new piece of technology comes out that can replace humans in a specific task, the job market for that task will shrink rapidly. What will fast food workers or truck drivers do when their jobs get replaced? They'll have to compete with millions of other displaced workers who are in the same situation. The glut of labor will cause wages to crash for the remaining low skilled jobs, and workers who once earned a decent salary will be forced to live off of minimum wage. It's not just low skilled workers either - highly skilled workers will get replaced by software, and they'll be forced to move down the job ladder to lower wage tasks they can excel at. This will further stress the low skilled market.

In the 1980's when jobs were being moved overseas in record numbers, the caring words of the business leaders were "re-train". That was the message to the workers who grew up learning how to weld, bend sheet metal, or do some other factory labor. In other words, the wealthy people who got to keep their jobs told all the poor people who had lost their jobs that it wasn't their problem to worry about. And really, it wasn't. Moving jobs overseas worked really well for the business community, who has seen record growth in the last 30-40 years.

For the working class though, wages started to level out around 1970 and have been stagnant since 1980. Productivity is at an all time high but the benefits of that technology have mostly gone to the wealthy. The poor to get to enjoy cheap prices from places like Wal Mart, but their lower wages mean that the benefits cancel out. In technical terms, we say that the "real wage" for workers has gone down since 1980. As we've opened up the globe for competition, US workers have been forced to compete with workers in Asia and Mexico, and no amount of re-training has been able to end the decline. If competing with low wage foreign labor was tough on workers before, competing with zero wage robots is going to be worse.

As computers get better, low skilled humans will seem less and less desirable compared to automated systems. In much the same way that horses lost favor to the automobile for the transportation of goods, the average human will lose favor to a computer. Some jobs will be difficult to automate but those markets will still see an influx of new workers displaced from other fields. The result will be a further depression of the labor market even though productivity will shoot through the roof.

The business class will see significant growth from the increase in productivity, but for the vast majority of workers things will get much worse. Wages will go down and so too will opportunity. Those who in past generations would have hoped to own a house and a car will be happy just to survive. In a world where productivity is higher than it has ever been, the majority of people will have their sights set lower than any generation in the previous century. People will struggle just to get by.

Many will curse at the robots and software that took over their jobs. They see that wealth is tied to employment and will despise the technology that took away their work. But does that make sense? To damn the tools that bring humans more wealth? Imagine our parable again. What if one individual took ownership of the new technology and took all the benefit for themselves? What if, rather than giving out the extra food to those who no longer had work, the one who took ownership found a nearby town and traded the food for other goods to enjoy? This person would enrich themselves to the detriment of their fellow community members. These community members, perhaps rightfully outraged at this scenario, could choose to smash the machine and re-enter the agreement they had before where most of them had to work to survive. That certainly would put food back in the mouths of those who had lost work but it is far and away not the best option for the people.

What if, instead, the people questioned the ownership of the machine? After all, this machine appeared out of nowhere, so why should one individual own it? What if instead of smashing it, they all took collective ownership of the machine and its output? Now rather than reverting back to a subsistence lifestyle, the people could all enjoy a better life. It should be clear that this is a much better outcome for the people than smashing the machine that brings them prosperity.

Thus we see the decision we face as we head to an automated world. Do we want the wealth created by automation to go to all of us, or to an elite few? If we want to share that wealth, how do we ensure we achieve the desired outcome?

Enter: Communism

We've faced this question before. In the 19th century the world moved from a farming economy to an industrial economy, and many noted the inherent inequality between factory owners and the workers. The philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed that workers in a factory produce great wealth, but they do so for the factory owners. The workers themselves get paid only a small fraction of the value they create. The disparity between what the workers produce and what they receive in pay was referred to by Marx and Engels as a surplus, and it is a defining characteristic of capitalism that business owners receive the surplus from their workers. Business owners get wealthy, while workers struggle to survive.

For Marx and Engels, this arrangement made little sense. Collectively, the workers gave up enormous wealth to the business owners. Was it possible for the workers to instead capture that wealth for themselves? Marx and Engels believed it was. They believed workers could form a collective that owned the factory, direct a small portion of the wealth of that collective to manage the business, and take the rest of the wealth for members of the collective - the workers. In doing so, they would turn the capitalist system on its head. Instead of a few individuals receiving the benefit of the labor of many, the workers would capture the benefit of their own labor and direct a small portion of their funds to the various managerial tasks not done by the workers. All who worked would own their output.

This is what the laborers in our parable did when they took ownership of the machine. They could have found other work, competed with each other, and tried to purchase food from the individual who had originally taken the machine, but they found that they could be much better off if they owned the machine collectively.

The same is true for us now with automation. We could soon face an economy where a few elite corporations own the automation that runs the world. The machine that could free us all will be in our midst, but not in our possession. Individuals who used to work will be unemployed, and an elite few will enjoy prosperity never before seen in human history. The masses will struggle to find the funds to purchase what they need from those who control the automation.

At least, that is the dystopia many fear will become reality. And it seems clear that if we do not change our expectations, that is where we are headed. But if we can see the road we are headed down, we can change course.

A Way Forward

How can we solve this problem? How can we end the exploitation of unemployed workers when so much abundance from automation is at our fingertips?

The answer lies in ownership of the machine. Please see Part 2 of this post here: The Machine.

Advancements in technology mean that the dawn of a new era of robotics is upon us. Automation is moving out of the factory and in to the real world. As this happens, we will see significant increases in productivity as well as drastic cuts in employment. We have an opportunity to markedly improve the lives of all people. Will we sieze it?

For decades, the biggest limitations in robotics were related to computing and perception. Robots couldn't make sense of their environments and so were fixed to the floor, their movements precalculated and repetitive.

Now however, we are beginning to see those limitations fall away, leading to a step-change in the capabilities of robotic systems. Robots now understand their environment with high fidelity, and safely navigate through it.

On the sensing side, we're seeing multiple order of magnitude reductions in the cost of 3D sensors used for mapping, obstacle avoidance, and task comprehension. Time of flight cameras such as those in the Microsoft Kinect or Google Tango devices are edging their way into the mainstream in high volumes. LIDAR sensors commonly used on self-driving cars were typically $60k or more just a few years ago. This year at CES however, two companies, Quanergy and Velodyne, announced new solid-state LIDAR devices that eliminate all moving parts and carry a sub-$500 price point.

Understanding 3D sensor data is a computationally intensive task but advancements in general purpose GPU computing have introduced new ways to quickly process the information. Smartphones are pushing the development of small, powerful processors, and we're seeing companies like NVIDIA shipping low cost GPU/CPU combos such as the X1 that are ideal for many robotics applications.

To make sense of all this data, we're seeing significant improvements in software for robotics. The open source Robot Operating System (ROS), for example, is widely used in industry and at 9 years old, just hit version 2.0. Meanwhile advances in machine learning mean that computers can now perform many tasks better than humans.

All these advancements mean that robots are moving beyond the factory floor and in to the real world. Soon we'll see a litany of problems being solved by robotics. Amazon already uses robots to lower warehousing costs, and several new companies are looking to solve the last mile delivery problem. Combined with self-driving cars and trucks this will mean drastic cost reductions for the logistics industry, with a ripple effect that lowers the cost of all goods.

As volumes go up, we will see cost reductions in expensive mechanical components such as motors and linkages. In five years time, most of the patents for metal 3D printers will expire, which will bring on a wave of competition to lower costs for new manufacturing methods.

While many will benefit greatly from these advances, there are worrying implications for others. Truck driver is the most common job in nearly every state, but within a decade those jobs will see drastic cuts. Delivery companies like Amazon Fresh and Google Shopping Express currently rely on fleets of human drivers, as do taxi services Uber and Lyft. It seems reasonable that those companies will move to automated vehicles.

Meanwhile, there are a great number of unskilled jobs that have already reduced workers to near machines. Fast food restaurants, for example, provide clear cut scripts for workers to follow, eliminating any reliance on human intelligence. It won't be long before robots are smart enough to do those jobs too.

Some people believe new jobs will be created to replace the old ones, but I believe that at some point robots will simply surpass low skilled workers in capability and become more desirable laborers.

It is my deepest hope that long before that happens, we as a society take a serious look at the way we share the collective wealth of our Earth. Robots should not simply replace workers, but eliminate the need for humans to work for survival. Robots can so significantly increase productivity that we can eliminate scarcity for all of life's necessities. In doing so, we can provide all people with wealth and freedom unseen in human history.

Making that happen is technologically simple, but will require significant changes to the way we think about society. We need many new thinkers to generate ideas, and would do well to explore concepts like basic income and the work of philosophers like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, among others.

The most revolutionary aspect of the change robotics brings will not be the creation of new wealth, but in how it enables access to the wealth we already have.

Today is an exciting time to be a roboticist. For a long time, robots were relegated to factory floors. Bolted down in one spot, they would repeat one dull task a million times. Welding on car fenders, gluing in windshields, or painting doors.

In the last ten years, however, advances in computing, battery technology, sensing, and software have made it possible to build robots that can understand the environment around them. We've always been able to build a platform with wheels, but now we can actually program it to drive around and do something useful. So we're beginning to see self driving cars to move us around, drones to monitor crops, and toy robot kits that teach any kid with an iPad how to program.

When I was a kid, I dreamed of these things. Now I go to any consumer electronics store and they have an entire aisle devoted just to flying robots. And there are jobs available to me to work on the next generation flying robots with better cameras, longer battery life, and built in games and apps.

Or there's companies devoted to logistics. Amazon already offers one hour deliveries in San Francisco, currently powered by droves of human drivers working as contractors to make a few extra bucks in their week. Google, too, does same-day delivery with human drivers. Bay Area companies have picked up on the growing need for efficiency improvements in these delivery services, and a quick check of the robotics job boards shows a few positions available at companies looking to capitalize on that need.

There's a company building a car-sized drone to ferry us from one place to another without any traffic or stoplights.

Then there's military contractors with fat budgets looking to optimize the next kill in the name of freedom. For some of us, anyway.

I look at all these options and I think to myself: is this all there is? The robotics jobs available today broadly fit into a few different categories:

• Solutions to help wealthy companies reduce costs by eliminating human labor.
• Solutions to help wealthy countries maintain their power over others.
• Solutions to help wealthy individuals entertain themselves.
• Solutions to help wealthy individuals save time and money.
• Solutions to help wealthy individuals teach their children skills not taught in public schools due to budget issues.

The common theme is, robots are for the wealthy.

I find that unsatisfying. Do I really want to spend my life devoting myself to making sure the most comfortable people in the world can be even more comfortable?

No, absolutely not. I've been laser focused on a career in robotics since I was 11 years old. I've worked my entire adult life to learn all the skills I need to build robots. I'm proficient in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and software engineering. I can observe any problem and devise a robot that would solve it. Then I can go build it. I do this out of habit with every problem I see. My friends will attest that I constantly say "that sounds like a problem for a robot!"

I have an intimate knowledge of mechanical systems and how we can use software and electronics to control them to do useful work. Because of this, I've come to believe that every task necessary to support human life can be done by robots. Robots can solve a lot of problems.

But when I think of a list of the most important problems I want to solve, absolutely none of them involve entertaining a small group of the wealthiest people on the planet. Certainly far less than 1% of the population of the earth can afford a $1000 drone, and I don't consider the marginal increase in happiness toy drones create to be solving a major world problem.

What about the other 7 billion people on the earth who have basic needs that can be solved by robots? Who is working on solutions for them?

Surely, some people will say that advancing drone technology does help the world's poorest. That toy drone with the 4K camera may not ever help poor children directly, but wealthy people support the growth of the drone market and the advancement in engineering skills that comes with more companies working on those systems. Other drone companies do a lot of work in the agricultural space, and better agricultural drones will contribute to better food for the poorest in the world.

At least, that's the story I'm sure many could come up with. But I'm not sure I buy it. Do you really think people who don't even have running water need a drone that will optimize their crop output? Sure, it might be good to have, but if it costs more than an entire village makes in a decade that's not gonna happen.

The truth is, the global poor simply have different problems than the wealthy, and this sort of "trickle down engineering" isn't going to do a lot to solve their problems.

But there are SO MANY MORE poor people in the world than there are wealthy people. And their problems are much more serious. I'd feel way more satisfied in my job if I helped one poor person eat than if I helped one rich person take a drone selfie.

If I take a look at the jobs boards for Silicon Valley though, there aren't any robotics companies working on solutions for the global poor.

That seems strange, since creating solutions that help poor people would have way more impact than making perfectly comfortable people even more comfortable.

If robotics has the potential to make such a huge impact on some people's lives, why aren't more people working directly on that problem?

Then I remember: poor people don't have a lot of money. We operate within a capitalist system, and in a capitalist system only people who can provide you money have any value. Sure, capitalists have a lot of feelings about starving children in poor countries, but when it comes time to do real hard work to solve people's problems, we come up with better ways to take drone selfies. Because there is no monetary gain to be had from solving the problems of poor people, we completely ignore them.

That is beyond fucked up.

I've talked to people about this. The answers range from "that's just the way things are" to "well, start a company, get rich, then use that money to fund your own operations."

Eh... sure. Maybe. Starting a company and getting rich isn't easy. I know, because I've tried. It takes a LOT of effort and I don't want to work on solving these problems indirectly. And I refuse to accept that things have to be this way. As an engineer, my job is to solve problems. And the fact that we can't arrange our labor in a sane way is a problem. And let me be clear: the fact that I want to build robotics for the poor and that I can't just go get a job to do it is a problem. I honestly don't give a shit about making more toys for rich people. There are real problems in the world and I'm pissed off that it's so hard to work on them.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'm reading a lot and talking with people with the hope that we can figure something out. Is the solution a basic income, communism, or anarchism? Whatever it is, how do we get there from where we are?