Unless we find a new source of commercialized energy we’re working under the assumption that our lives will be powered by combustion materials or the electron waves we access via our wall outlets. The new players in the game are precise control systems that weren’t once a possibility with our limited computational ability. Anything with variable actuation and sensors can now be tuned with an elegant autopilot.
Cars are great, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why we’re trying so hard to haul around two tons of material to transport one human when we can get the same speed and comfort levels from something that weighs 1/tenth as much (are you really taking the conservation of the planet seriously if you don’t normalize some safer version of a motorcycle?). Same thing goes with our silicon valley entrepreneurs that are trying to build the first commercialized flying car as an enlarged hexacopter with wings – heavy. This goes along with the trend of shrinking things, our inventions shrink over time, it’s like sculpting in a way if sculpting was done in iterations. The flying car -It’s a very pointed goal that references a lot of sci fi ideation. Engineers love referencing their childhood video games and sci-fi symbols for functional projects. The aerospace industry has no shortage of dreamers. A have met engineers who dream of being cyborgs, ridding the world of microplastics, curing covid, and living on star-trek spaceships, all of their own invention. It’s grandiose and it’s possible, no matter how much shame he/she might feel for having dreams they secretly don’t actually want to give up their 20-30s for because it’s a lot of work and money.
My grandiose dream that got me suckered into a professional robot part shopping job they call an “electrical engineer” is flight ( i guess my childhood fantasy inspiration parallel to “Starship” is fairies, like one book in specific, It was the lavender fairy. Not super sexy or well known). Take the nearly extinct pterodactyl that is the hang glider and make it flap. Segmented wing sections that have a spring mechanism in each joint so that gaining latitude feels as effortless as jumping on a trampoline (and is only possible with oscillatory drive (as opposed to full rotational drives)), weight shift control, converts to a parachute shape for landing. I have a nice rough draft all planned out, but I’m moving away from the type of pointed thinking that produces inventions like this all together.
Inventing is a complicated capitalist venture. The key to a successful project are the clear and precise details. That means modules, tests, proofs, standards and 3rd parties reviews, data sheet specs, component nuances, a deep dive into all the possible things that can go wrong and limitations. It’s a lot of thinking ahead, planning, trial and error. An AI, with a bunch a parameters and a set point can make an optimized version of something. A million small iterations, test, choose and repeat. You get these bone-like lattices that we can 3D print into existence. How can we grow ideas like plants? Harness the same attraction that kept people playing Tetris for hours at a time or scrolling through tik-tok feeds. The same passive by incredibly driving interest that teaches us language as children, how to draw, play piano… Why is coding and math conceptually more difficult? It’s not, it’s the buttons and careful syntax – the rules don’t bend and the less bullshit a person is able to utilize in the pursuit of their goal the quicker they’ll fatigue. When it comes to static pieces AI optimization works great – I mean – learning whatever primitive software we have right now requires the patience of a Buddhist monk in order to not get discouraged by the bugs and lack of intuition you notice when you try to zoom in on a certain area and lose the ability to zoom out back to image you had before. Then you’ll try to export the thing to another software that specializes in something else related to simulation and that takes anywhere from one minute to 3 weeks. All this effort to clearly convey an idea to a bunch of people who want to go home but need love not living with their parents. It’s the bitch of this whole industry. I can’t believe at lunch everyone talks about how stupid their project lead is, or how there aren’t enough female coworkers, when the overall tediousness of proving an idea makes this supposedly creative field the least creative network of highly specialized software button muscle memorized gurus that only very few are allowed enough capital to control in order to get the privilege of capitalizing for their idea that will most likely fail to first couple of times. Meanwhile if the highly specialized software guru fails back down at the bottom of the tree their job is in jeopardy, their mom might not be proud of them, their social life will require people to judge their intelligence by something other than a title. Fear. Driven.
It’s selfish of me to want a more idealized playground for the little guy, but with all selfish ideas, I can usually find an altruistic reason to bring others on board. As Matt Ridley explains in “The evolution of Everything” Ideas have sex, they behave life species in natural selection, and they can mate with other ideas to acquire new traits an evolve – that is why more ideas pop up in city environments. Patents, credit, and informational barriers are getting in the way of the randomness of humans vibing that drives progress.
I thought about how to convert an idea to a full fledged model utilizing the same passive thought people use while scrolling through TIkyTok. I noticed I’m revisiting a similar problem I have in my first year working at a Med device company – making an impedance matching device, zero reflection, 100% Power delivery to an unknown load. We moved a ferrite core in and out of an inductor to vary the impedance between the load and the generator. I wasn’t content with that, it could be cleaner, no moving parts. I thought of a 100 theories, all of which were so out there I couldn’t cheaply test them with off the shelf components. I had the support required to create from my colleagues but no funds, at the aerospace company it was the opposite (way more depressive).
I wonder what it says that I still seek out this sort of problem in large scale social models. When I notice my psychology affecting my “practical ideas” I initially feel very insecure. I’m small, succumbing to my emotions but disguising it as some pure scientific concept. Ideas are layered with the motives of human idiosyncrasies – seemingly random choices, brilliant on the surface, but enabled by something wholly disconnected.
Ideas are random and brilliance can be turned on with the right perspective. If the inventor of the airplane or car had a different childhood then the world might be running differently. I know from playing golf that any swing can be tuned and practiced into a “tour playing” swing.
When AI reads your amazon customer service messages, guesses your syntax, maybe that’s where we should start. When you put in that seed for an AI to make an art-piece out of the internet’s database of knowledge. All the memory of people using solidworks and Altium being recorded and added to that database. The a bunch of people writing, talking, drawing, swiping, maybe moving – the way they would if there was no pressure or deadline, and an AI master integrations algorithm piecing together millions of human decisions toward what turns into a fully defined model at the end. Invention and work could be as alive and spontaneous as natural selection.
Anthropological Magical Realism 