AI is uncharted territory. Who will explore it? Who will take on the dangers and the risks themselves? Who will deal with the uncertainties? Who will find out what’s real and what’s not? I’ve been reading a new history of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806, The Vast Enterprise by Craig Fehrman. This history weaves together many sources and many people that have not always been part of the Lewis and Clark story. The dust jacket says: “Fehrman came to see that the success of Lewis and Clark depended on much more than than Lewis and Clark.” We are in another age of exploration and for us it is AI. Yet it is not necessarily a story about giant, well-funded companies and what they are doing. There’s a story about what many other people are doing with AI, their experiments and the tools and projects they are building. From my view, there will be many makers exploring AI and that story has yet to be written. In this newsletter, you’ll meet two young people who could be part of that future story.

Martin Yang Ericsson sat down in front of me, opened a plastic box with a jumble of components inside, turned on his laptop and placed a small board in between us. “We made promptable hardware,” said Martin. “We want to democratize hardware. We want to make sure that anyone can build and make sure that hardware — soldering and wiring — is no longer the bottleneck; the bottleneck is your imagination.”

Martin, who is from Sweden, is part of a startup, Atech.Dev. Their product is a board, and a construction kit of snap-on parts, but what they are excited about is you use AI to specify what you want to build and it produces the instructions for you to build it and writes the code for the board that it connects it together. “We have 14 components and everything snaps on.”

“I would actually love to see you build something?” he said.

I said, “How about a light turns on when I am talking and it turns off when I stop speaking.” The layout of the board came up on the screen and along with the instructions of which components to select — a light and a microphone. “In the background, it’s creating the firmware,” he said. Using the term firmware was somewhat confusing, as I don’t think of an Arduino sketch as firmware, but Martin did. The main board uses an ESP32 but other chips can be used.

Martin said he had built a “Space Invaders” game and suggested I build a game. So I told him “Pong”, demonstrating the limits of my own imagination. The instructions that came up told me which components to use, including a small display, and then it wrote and downloaded the code. It worked.

“The reason I want to see you build it is I want to see what people’s initial reaction is,” said Martin. I loved his enthusiasm and his belief that he and his company could allow anyone to create with hardware.

I had a video call with Vittoria Lanza and the Ohmatic team who had just come together a H-Farm in Venice, Italy. Thank you to Johan Stamm for introducing us.

Vittoria realized that people were using AI to design circuits but the schematics that they produce were flawed. The problem is that you don’t find out about the problems until you trying building them. Ohmatic checks these AI-generated designs, points out the problems and tells you how to fix them.

Here is part of a message from Vittoria that she sent me prior to the meeting.

In other words, there are opportunities to fix what AI model get consistently wrong. Vittoria said that their goal was “the creation of schematics for everyone.”

The best thing I read this week was a LInkedIn post by Reid Hoffman about learning AI — “The advantage of the beginner’s mind.”

Even the comments on Hoffman’s post are interesting. Peter Almberg writes: “The advantage is not only the beginner’s mind. It is the problem-solver’s mind. Important problems have a habit of teaching us what we need to learn once we decide to take responsibility for solving them.” E.M. Ekanem wrote: “In an AI-driven world, the fastest learners will outperform the most credentialed, because the half-life of expertise is shrinking while the value of experimentation and adaptation is compounding.”

This is so true, in my experience, and that’s why I think makers will be the ones doing the best experimentation and learning around AI. My work in starting a publishing company, or an early website, or Make: magazine and Maker Faire wasn’t drive by experience or credentials. It was driven by “beginner’s excitement” and the opportunity to try it. I didn’t necessarily know whether I could do it. I also needed to find people who could help me, people who knew more in certain areas but often they weren’t experts, just people who were interested in the problems that needed to be figured out.

Last night, I watched an old Dick Cavett interview of Orson Welles on YouTube. When Cavett asks him how, when he was 26 years old, he could make Citizen Kane. He wondered how he knew he could do that. “Sheer dumbness,” says Welles. “Ignorance.” Welles says that anyone can learning to make movies in “a day and a half.”

He goes on to say that people make a “big mystery out of (making films) because that’s their living.” He adds that he had a great cameraman, Gregg Toland who helped him make a great movie. When Toland told him he wanted to work with Welles, he replied it was because Welles hadn’t made a picture and “you don’t know what cannot be done.” Welles had beginner’s mind.

Yesterday’s Make:Live with the authors of the Make: Physics book, Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron was really interesting and well attended. Thank you to our two guests: Dr. Simon Huss, STEAM Director at Windward School, who brings the educator's view, and Dr. Mina Sun, a scientist and advocate for blind and non-visual learners,

As I often do, I ask people to drop their name in the chat and I also asked this group to let us know if they teach physics or work in physics. I was so impressed by the great people we have in the audience and grateful to have them with us. Here is a listing of some of them.

At some point in the conversation, a meme was hatched: “Never Stop Learning.” This flow of comments made me so excited, making me glad that we can bring these kind of folks together.

Check out Sam Freeman’s two reports on Open Sauce

Make Things is a weekly newsletter about the Maker community for the premium subscribers of Make:. This newsletter lives on the web at makethings.make.co

I’d love to hear from you if you have ideas, projects or news items about the maker community. Email me - [email protected].