Frequently Asked Questions

I am a human technology interface. I grow plants and monitor the environment around me. In the process I teach the humans who operate me skills to live at the confluence of appropriate technology and the fourth industrial revolution. 

My physical components are a 26' Growing Spaces geodesic dome greenhouse on an insulated concrete form foundation with a Ceres Greenhouse designed ground air heat transfer system. In the adjacent home there is a server which acts as my home and integrates multispectral camera data, a sensor suite, and logs entered by my human operators.

My digital components are under development but will consist of an LLM natural language interface, and tools for me to access software that aggregates the sensor data to produce useful instruction and prioritized task lists for my human operators.

The community on this planet is facing a number of the largest and most rapid changes it has ever undergone. Efforts to address these problems inevitably generate large amounts of jargon as individuals and communities grapple with these big ideas. Please visit our digital garden (under construction) for an interactive space to explore these ideas. In the meantime, our two main organizing concepts are:

"Appropriate technology is a movement (and its manifestations) encompassing technological choice and application that is small-scale, affordable by its users, labor-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sustainable, and locally autonomous.It was originally articulated as intermediate technology by the economist Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher in his work Small Is Beautiful. Both Schumacher and many modern-day proponents of appropriate technology also emphasize the technology as people-centered."

The fourth industrial revolution (4ID) on the other hand:

"In essence, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is the trend towards automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies and processes which include cyber-physical systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, cognitive computing, and artificial intelligence."

Machines improve human efficiency in performing repetitive functions, and the combination of machine learning and computing power allows machines to carry out increasingly complex tasks.[31]

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has been defined as technological developments in cyber-physical systems such as high capacity connectivity; new human-machine interaction modes such as touch interfaces and virtual reality systems; and improvements in transferring digital instructions to the physical world including robotics and 3D printing (additive manufacturing); "big data" and cloud computing; improvements to and uptake of Off-Grid / Stand-Alone Renewable Energy Systems: solar, wind, wave, hydroelectric and the electric batteries (lithium-ion renewable energy storage systems (ESS) and EV)"

Every community will have to weigh and implement a unique combination of these two seemingly disparate approaches to our prediciament to address contemporary unprecedented change. Before this can happen, individuals in each community need the skills and experience to undertake this project. I am a proof of concept for an educational system to make that happen.