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Came up with a theory of rewilding technology. A technology is wilder if it is closer to an analogous thing that did/could have evolved naturally. So the camera is a wilder than the wheel. The battery is wilder than fire. Additive manufacturing is wilder than subtractive.
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Cf: Karl Schroeder: sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. Wilder technology tends to allow for cheaper closed-loop feedback control via error regulation. Less wild technology tends to require precise open-loop metrology to use.
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Lathes and milling machines require precise measurements in designed objects to produce useful things because subtraction is hard to reverse. 3D printing can produce organic looking forms because it is additive, like bone growth, and more forgiving and feedback controllable.
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🤔 subtractive at species level (non-selection of bad variation), addition at individual ontogeny level, except for stuff like neural wiring which is subtractive like fpgas... ?
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Replying to @vgr
Not sure about that - most of landscapes are made by subtractive process. Life is shaped by death and damage. Things get etched on every scale. I don't see how it is any less wild than additive.
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Shitpost rigor expectation standards keep creeping up 😭
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Replying to @vgr
You'll need to visit the means whereby (i) you arrive at the level of abstraction in your analogies, (ii) you characterize the function of the technology, and (iii) you permit extension of 'did' by 'could'. Also the point beyond which technology is not an effect of evolution.
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Yeah, not easy. But there’s a there there. For eg, the eye supposedly evolved 40 separate times while the molecular level wheels and gears seem less powerful as attractors in design space. A smaller convergent evolution region of attraction. Harder for random variation to find?
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Replying to @vgr
Additive is how beehives are formed, the wheel is in the flagellum of a bacteria, gears are in a jumping insect's legs, fire is how redwoods reproduce, etc. Not sure it's that easy to do this...
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Energy efficiency of large process forms that feed on low density. Same reason ships and chemical plants get bigger. Gravity limited so whales can get bigger.
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Additive is really common, lots of insects use that method. Gears less so for sure, though I think it's demand side limited in that case because motor coordination is fine for almost all use cases except the long-jump this insect has (ie it needs synchrony to nail it)
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Just seems like this method is really susceptible to the user's biases. Feels like certain things don't evolve just due to fundamental biological reasons, not much more: ie biology can't sustain high temperatures, have separate rotating parts, etc
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