Now the world’s engineers have brilliantly created thousands of designs for open source ventilators (bringing the cost down by 2 orders or magnitude), it begs the question: What machines should we tackle next? What’s important, expensive, and public good? NB before we begin the list, hat tip to the Global Village Construction Set which has been on this mission for many years with agricultural and town-scale hardware. MRI machines (£200k – £3m)CAT Scanners Electrocardiogram (ECG)…
I was thinking about how governments respond to ‘surge capacity’ issues like this. Part of the reason they don’t drill for BIG things as well as they could is that they’re TOO complex. So rather than work out and maintain relationships with tonnes of organisations which you’re ‘very unlikely’ to need, you create emergency laws you can pass which requisition things into a command economy instead. However.. I wonder what a good non-govt response looks…
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“Mass social movements based on coalitions of a broad range of groups will be needed to drive political support as individual issue groups are not strong enough on their own. Forging a sense of collective identity and finding common values is vital.” — Zero Carbon Britain
Here are my notes from Exponential Organisations, a book recommended to me this weekend by a VC in Paris. Have a “massively transformative purpose (MTP)” (ie a worthwhile mission) Don’t plan more than 1 year ahead. Measure your metrics. Acronym alert: the first letters of the next 5 characteristics make up the word SCALE. Staff on demand – have a small permanent core, and hire when needed Community and Crowd – make use of your partners,…