Mosaicbot

That’s pretty cool… though to me, the first thing that springs to mind isn’t mosaics, but moveable type. And although it’s state of the art, it still looks like an early version of something. Like this did once:

(and speaking of which, there’s a nice collection of them here)

In a funny sort of way, it’s the same machine… or part of the same machine, and the First Guttenburg Shift is the same revolution as the Second – the one we’re in now. 500 years isn’t that long… not when we’re talking about the scale of things that we’re talking about… evolution. It’s the ‘B’ of the Bang.

I get this feeling when I’m programming sometimes… that coding isn’t about architecture, it’s about archeology. It feels like brushing away at the surface to reveal something that already (as a potential) exists. This is part of the reason why I’m violently (yes violently) opposed to software-patents. They’re trying to ringfence fundamental rules of mathmatics and reality. It’s fundamentally immoral. It’s cheating future generations of the shoulders that we were given to stand on when we were still small.

But anyway… brushing away at this great big… thing… this hidden machine-city. FOR loops are a fundmental law of nature. Object Orientated Programming, Relational Databases, MVC. They will have their day, be superceded, reinvented – but I can’t help but feel that in a very real sense, they weren’t ‘architected’, they were discovered. Uncovered.

Which kind of begs the question… what exactly is it that we’re building here?

Because that robot video above… is OBVIOUSLY just the beginning.