Self Assembling Robots

These are small robots that have the capacity to self assemble into ‘architectural’ forms. This is a very big change, and while we can get all whatever about tech determinism the key thing I’d take from it is that it is a networked/distributed model of organisation. Small pieces that only know enough to do enough, rather than our older intellectual models which assumed you needed to know all of something to be able to do anything. For example software companies once thought you needed a very strict design document to write code, but agile development showed that wasn’t the case. Then software companies thought you needed centralised command and control to write any major software, open source development demonstrated that that is not the case. Companies once thought that the top of the organisation had to be in charge of all, and that is no longer the case, and in education we once thought the teacher had to know all and somehow just communicate this to students. Likewise, the internet as a scale free network just happened, and just happens, with no central command and control decision making. This is a big theoretical change in how we understand the world, a move from centres (the brain, one part of the brain, some sort of dominating ideology or institution) to realising that there aren’t really centres (to the body, to the brain, to the world).