I didn't know about the Red Cross and its donuts. The example I've always used for this is helping a friend move.
If the friend asks "hey, will you help me move? I'm buying pizza and beer afterwards!" I will more than likely say yes, even though I can buy my own pizza and beer.
If they instead say "hey, will you help me move? I'll pay you $21.58 for your time," I'd probably bristle. Even though that might be the equivalent price of a few slices of pizza and a beer, the category has changed from showing appreciation to placing an actual value on my time, at which point working all day for $21.58 stops making sense.
In behavioral economics that’s sometimes referred to as “social norms versus market norms” [first useful link, 1].
The example given (I think it’s via Ariely) is that you wouldn’t pay your friend to have cooked you dinner. This is the same thing: there’s social contract value in helping your friend out, and they’re showing appreciation with a token. In fact, if you friend offers you more money than the pizza and beer, you are likely to be insulted by the lowball offer, since you now evaluate the suggestion in terms of work for hire via market norms.
Social norms are so powerful though, that even if the friend offers you higher than your market rate, it’s still not worth it to take it, as it would shift your relationship (with lifetime value X) from a social one to a commercial one. Usually when people say “humans are irrational” they should be saying “people have complex utility / reward functions”!
I have this relatively unconventional theory that, if we use automation just right and make the cost of food production, delivery, and preparation low enough, and also do so where ownership of the machinery is distributed throughout society, that we could make it a social norm to give anyone who needs it free food. All in a voluntary system. We just need to make the actual cost of the whole supply chain low enough that people don't care about giving away a bit for free. Like in the extreme case how cafes give out free wifi because the marginal cost of delivering wifi to one more person is so low. I could imagine shops having a "free food" option made using some low cost proteins and fiber and prepared using some cheap robot. And then they would charge for hand made food or something, using the free food as a loss leader.
So my theory is that those robots need to be made as cheaply as possible. And that makes me think they need to be open source so anyone capable of manufacturing them can compete to supply them. Like how 3D printers got so cheap once the patents expired. They went from $30k to $300 in 20 years.
The real trick is sustaining robotics businesses that can pay engineering talent to produce open source robotics. Prusa Research has succeeded here with their 3D printers, and I am hoping I am able to reproduce that success with the farming robot I am working on now. But we aren't certain we will make it open source. It depends on how we can sustain funding. I think it's very possible though and I'm committed to it.
I think it's extremely interesting that Prusa Research can give all of their IP away and coexist in the market with clones at less than 1/2 the price. Users understand that the first party product is higher quality, and those that can afford it still buy from Prusa. There seems to be room in that market for both Prusa and the many clones. I wonder if we can reproduce this success with automation in other areas.
Pretty cool concept you should write more about this. Do you have any other examples of companies that give away their IP but still thrive in the physical or digital world? Will definitely check out Prusa Research. I've always wondered if a restaurant could be built upon a similar concept, teaching people how to recreate it's foods but being so cheap and accessible that the cost of creating it yourself outweighs just buying it.
Yes actually Sparkfun Electronics was the first company I noticed that followed this pattern. They are essentially a hardware company that gives most or all of their product's IP away.
I remember this blog post made it very clear that very open source hardware companies could thrive:
They do a lot of hard work that isn't in their product's IP. Just bringing physical matter together is hard and essentially that's what they get paid for.
The similar company Adafruit I believe does not always open source their products, though they do produce a lot of open guides and open source code. It would be interesting to understand what led them to keep some products partially proprietary (they'd share schematics but not board files sometimes). I wonder if cheap office space in Colorado vs a warehouse in NYC caused the differences.
Also all of the companies that make 3D printers are part of this. The Chinese companies which sell clones are important innovators in the field. Prusa and Creality are perhaps in some ways like Apple and Samsung - they feed off one another. They do not merely clone the prusa - none of the big companies sell an exact clone of the MK3 for example - they instead make the design work for their factory. Prusa relies on lots of 3D printed parts because the best factory for them is a print farm of their machines. But in China they may prefer sheet metal bending and injection molding. Since the design has few restrictions, whichever hardware company that can make a functioning product cheapest will succeed in a normal market. AKA open sourcing has some automatic cost reducing effect.
So if we open source a bunch of technology related to meeting core human needs, then the cost of keeping people alive will go down. Then you need a means of distributing that technology throughout the world. And again open source allows free movement of product around the world - no regional restrictions or limited supply chains. The takeaway for all of us is - the future can be good, go work on some useful open source stuff and lets all keep researching how best to fund it.
So this whole theory is like "OMG we're doing everything backwards" and I definitely want to write about it more. I just find personal engineering projects to draw my attention more than writing. I need a Walden Pond.
hi taylor, adafruit's products are open-source, all the board files are on github, check the open hardware certification listing with adafruit, which is currently the most certified (329 out of 783 certifications, are from adafruit) https://certification.oshwa.org/list.html?q=adafruit
"cheap office space" is not a factor in our decision to be an open-source hardware company.
Okay good to know thank you! Somehow I recall finding some products whose source files were not listed next to the schematics, but maybe that was a while ago.
So kind of like how a bar has a bowl of nuts or pretzels out for free.
Or, at work, I bought a pastry from the cafeteria. About 5 minutes later they put out a whole platter of the same pastries in the dining area for free (they didn't sell, and would be dumped otherwise).
My robot will, if we succeed, make it much cheaper to do organic agriculture. This would reduce our reliance on herbicides. Long term I hope we can automate more biointensive agriculture that uses complementary plants to ward off pests. If you truly feel that agriculture is an "original sin" then we need to fix that. Because we can't stop making food. We can only make food production more environmentally friendly.
Also, there is this case of a daycare center which started to collect fines for late child pickups. The result? The rate of late pickups increased. Picking the child late stopped being a shameful thing to do, causing the poor worker to wait for you, it started being a normal paid service you could use every time you wanted.
https://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-wha...
Even more interesting, and relevant to this discussion, was that the rate didn't decrease again (within the measured time frame) after the fine was removed again! (from the paper linked in your article)
You make me think of some study that concluded "Pay enough (market rate) or pay nothing." People who will do volunteer work for an organization because they believe in the mission will walk away and cuss you if you offer them 5 cents an hour for the same work because it's all you can afford to pay.
You got weird friends, no one's ever had to ask or bribe me, I would just offer to help.
In turn I'd also be uncomfortable asking others to do manual labor for me, if they didn't offer when I said I was moving I wouldn't ask. Buying them supper after would be a given, no bribe required.
“I’ll buy you pizza for helping me move” is an extremely common social interaction, to the point of being a trope. It’s not a bribe, it’s an acknowledgement that helping somebody move is a huge amount of work and some token of appreciation is wise.
And when I was TA grading exams, the professor would buy us all pizza as well. It was technically unnecessary as grading was part of why were being paid as TAs, but it was a nice touch and put us all in a better mood and with a favorable view of the professor.
Sitting down and having a meal is breaking bread with friends. Thats always more than a simple financial transaction of $20 or so.
There was an article that time is our most important resource... Having a meal with someone is giving your most important resource to them, and them to you.
> Buying them supper after would be a given, no bribe required.
I think this is actually kind of the point. By offering to provide pizza, you're casually confirming that you're still operating in the paradigm where friends help each other out without looking too closely at the balance sheet, as opposed to offering nothing (awkward) or paying them (turning it into a transaction).
Weird friends are great. Everyone secretly appreciates special handling. Little bribes make the world go round. It's quite an art getting someone to help without them eventually feeling a tiny hint of being taken advantage of, and vice versa.
I think the idea is partly "I could use some help with this, but I'll get some food and drinks and we'll try to hang out and have a good time even though the work part sucks"
I've always interpreted it as a "reason" to hang out, or a politeness thing. It also makes it clear that your buddy doesn't plan to shoo you out of their new apartment once you're done the job.
If the friend asks "hey, will you help me move? I'm buying pizza and beer afterwards!" I will more than likely say yes, even though I can buy my own pizza and beer.
If they instead say "hey, will you help me move? I'll pay you $21.58 for your time," I'd probably bristle. Even though that might be the equivalent price of a few slices of pizza and a beer, the category has changed from showing appreciation to placing an actual value on my time, at which point working all day for $21.58 stops making sense.