As an example of the type of research being done, you must be willing to build something that will be considered commodity in 15 years time at today's price.
Basic Income can be a great stepping block to cultural improvements which include things like tech. It is true that some things need allocation of resources which Basic Income doesn’t directly address, but a society with Basic Income might be more reliably capable of getting it done.
The researchers at PARC needed lots of money. For example, they built the Alto. They then used the Alto as a tool to design lots of other great things.
A product like the Alto doesn't get done by a few hipsters subsisting on "basic income".
I skate to where the puck is going to be,
not where it has been.
You can build today's complicated things cheaply. But if you really want to achieve a quantum leap you need to think 10 years out. It is not cheap to build today the prototypes of things that will be desirable in 10 years. That is what Xerox PARC was doing.
It is tempting to look at an FPGA and say that it only costs $10. Or maybe even $1000 for the top end. But that's the tip of the iceberg. Designs that go into a high end FPGA could easily require 10 man-years of engineering time. That's for a single FPGA hardware design itself, not the system it goes into, not the associated software.
Once you need to do those sorts of things you won't find the right people by recruiting basic income hipsters that are lounging around at your local Starbucks. And you will need money to pay the considerable non-salary expenses, even if you could convince all the people to work for nothing but equity.
Right now, it's relatively cheap to do software-only things. Which explains why there are so many of those sorts of startups. But it's not cheap to design and build physical things.
I was sufficiently good at building stuff in FPGAs and writing the software to use it that I don't need to work anymore. I see the kind of decisions that I need to make now on what projects to work on as the same as those that would need to be made by creative people receiving basic income.
People seem happy to donate to Kickstarter projects, the amounts needed would be smaller if the participants already had enough to live on.
What do you want to build today that is too expensive to try out ?
Virtual reality environments with good graphic. Or maybe something like microsoft hololens. Glasses which work like AR HUD and tracks your movements, your gestures and maybe voice. This requires a lot of custom hardware (microsoft developed ASICs for this to do it in realtime).
Also .. it would be awesome to port smalltalk to 3D.
"The Alto hardware was fairly simple, most stuff was done in software."
It was pretty simple. I've used and programmed an Alto, back when Stanford had a few around. It was basically a reworked Data General minicomputer in a small rackmount case. 16 bit word oriented, programmable in BCPL or Mesa at the low level, Smalltalk at the higher level. The removable hard disk was the same as a DEC RK05 cartridge disk. The Ethernet interface was very simple, and coax Ethernet was electrically simple. Alan Kay referred to Ethernet as "an Alohanet with a captive ether". The CPU was microcoded, and cycles were stolen from the CPU's microcode engine to run the peripherals. None of this was pushing the state of the art. The CPU hardware was a minimum viable product.
The keyboard, mouse, and display were all new, and nicely engineered. Most of the hardware effort went into those. The keyboard had nice key switches and a massive metal casting. The display was the first good black-on-white display, with a big portrait-format screen. The original mouse wasn't that great.
Maybe the real question is how your 0.01% can find each other in order to discuss ideas.
From what I have read, the people at PARC got there by similar routes, there was one group from SDS and another from Evans & Sutherland. I'm not sure we still have the same kind of "landmarks" that will attract the right people.
Comments
Rather, I'd say it needs people working full time. With things like basic income, this can be decorrelated from "money" a good deal.
Check this video running in another thread. This a known Alan Kay talk, he did it already a few times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs
As an example of the type of research being done, you must be willing to build something that will be considered commodity in 15 years time at today's price.
You won't get there with basic income.
Basic Income can be a great stepping block to cultural improvements which include things like tech. It is true that some things need allocation of resources which Basic Income doesn’t directly address, but a society with Basic Income might be more reliably capable of getting it done.
I agree with basic income for everyone.
Just don't agree it is enough to innovate at Xerox PARC scale, as what is being discussed is funding, not salaries.
The researchers at PARC needed lots of money. For example, they built the Alto. They then used the Alto as a tool to design lots of other great things.
A product like the Alto doesn't get done by a few hipsters subsisting on "basic income".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_alto
Building an Alto then required lots of money, you can prototype fairly complicated things now on a cheap FPGA.
Yes. Of course.
But, to quote Wayne Gretzky:
You can build today's complicated things cheaply. But if you really want to achieve a quantum leap you need to think 10 years out. It is not cheap to build today the prototypes of things that will be desirable in 10 years. That is what Xerox PARC was doing.It is tempting to look at an FPGA and say that it only costs $10. Or maybe even $1000 for the top end. But that's the tip of the iceberg. Designs that go into a high end FPGA could easily require 10 man-years of engineering time. That's for a single FPGA hardware design itself, not the system it goes into, not the associated software.
Once you need to do those sorts of things you won't find the right people by recruiting basic income hipsters that are lounging around at your local Starbucks. And you will need money to pay the considerable non-salary expenses, even if you could convince all the people to work for nothing but equity.
Right now, it's relatively cheap to do software-only things. Which explains why there are so many of those sorts of startups. But it's not cheap to design and build physical things.
I was sufficiently good at building stuff in FPGAs and writing the software to use it that I don't need to work anymore. I see the kind of decisions that I need to make now on what projects to work on as the same as those that would need to be made by creative people receiving basic income.
People seem happy to donate to Kickstarter projects, the amounts needed would be smaller if the participants already had enough to live on.
You are missing the point.
What would be the Alto of today designed with hardware from 2030, not with a cheap FPGA from 2015?
I don't think I am missing the point. The Alto hardware was fairly simple, most stuff was done in software.
What do you want to build today that is too expensive to try out ?
Virtual reality environments with good graphic. Or maybe something like microsoft hololens. Glasses which work like AR HUD and tracks your movements, your gestures and maybe voice. This requires a lot of custom hardware (microsoft developed ASICs for this to do it in realtime).
Also .. it would be awesome to port smalltalk to 3D.
It is fairly simple to you today, given that Alto exists.
It wasn't that simple for those guys in 1968, trying to imagine how a 199x computer would look like (Alan's words). That was their goal.
That is why they are called inventions and there are patents to assign to them.
Nobody knowns without doing the proper research.
"The Alto hardware was fairly simple, most stuff was done in software."
It was pretty simple. I've used and programmed an Alto, back when Stanford had a few around. It was basically a reworked Data General minicomputer in a small rackmount case. 16 bit word oriented, programmable in BCPL or Mesa at the low level, Smalltalk at the higher level. The removable hard disk was the same as a DEC RK05 cartridge disk. The Ethernet interface was very simple, and coax Ethernet was electrically simple. Alan Kay referred to Ethernet as "an Alohanet with a captive ether". The CPU was microcoded, and cycles were stolen from the CPU's microcode engine to run the peripherals. None of this was pushing the state of the art. The CPU hardware was a minimum viable product.
The keyboard, mouse, and display were all new, and nicely engineered. Most of the hardware effort went into those. The keyboard had nice key switches and a massive metal casting. The display was the first good black-on-white display, with a big portrait-format screen. The original mouse wasn't that great.
Thanks for the insight.
What do you want to build today that is too expensive to try out ?
That, as they say, is the $64,000 dollar question.
I sure don't know. I'm not creative enough. Do you know?
My intuition is that there is about 0.01% of the population that is visionary enough to properly answer that question.
Maybe the real question is how your 0.01% can find each other in order to discuss ideas.
From what I have read, the people at PARC got there by similar routes, there was one group from SDS and another from Evans & Sutherland. I'm not sure we still have the same kind of "landmarks" that will attract the right people.
I'm one of that 0.01%.
I encourage others to contact me to get the discussion going.
You are more right than you think. The initial manufacturing cost of an Alto (adjusted for inflation) was...
http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=12000+dollars+from+1973&x...
Wow. That's quite close.
I'm sure you get the reference, but since we're dealing with a worldwide audience, here's where it originates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_$64,000_Question
It was a meme: "a common catchphrase for a particularly difficult question or problem"